


weird science (and other occurrences at the end of the world)

by jaegerjagues



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, F/M, Hordak is in therapy; it's what he deserves, Kissing for science, Pacific Rim AU, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, alternating povs, canon typical age difference, i hate writing fight scenes but i love writing about giant robots, i used the f word once and you're not going to believe who says it, one gratuitous xiaolin showdown reference
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-06
Updated: 2021-01-06
Packaged: 2021-03-16 12:13:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28581801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaegerjagues/pseuds/jaegerjagues
Summary: There is a new scientist at the Etherian Shatterdome.
Relationships: Entrapta/Hordak (She-Ra)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 33





	weird science (and other occurrences at the end of the world)

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to this monster! I started it in June of 2020, and it's finally done! I'm very anxious about it, because I've written 25k? For a show that's been over for a while? Oopsies? 
> 
> Some notes:
> 
> 1.) Foreknowledge of Pacific Rim isn't required, but if you haven't seen it, why are you waiting? It's giant robots beating the crap out of giant lizards? Why wait? Treat yourself? Mako Mori would want you to. 
> 
> 2.) Hordak and Entrapta do _not_ drift together in this. They're scientists! They do science stuff! This is literally called weird science. Things get a little weird. 
> 
> 3.) There is some ableist language. It's very brief! 
> 
> 4.) Someone has a panic attack, but I think it's pretty vague? I'll come back and put a trigger warning on it as necessary.
> 
> 5.) I was going to wait to post this, but today has been awful for American Democracy and I think we can all use some stress relief lol

The skeleton of the kaiju Fanghorde is the first part of the Etheria Shatterdome that Entrapta sees.

It’s visible from two miles off the coastline, bones picked clean long ago by the gulls. Now an entire ecosystem stems from it, tips of the fresh pines reaching toward the horizon, bone spikes rising from the spine punching higher. Nestled in the ribs of the fallen beast sits the Etheria Shatterdome, one of three on the American west coast. It’s compact and no-nonsense, built into the shoreline and the beast out of necessity.

Entrapta falls in love with it immediately.

The closer they get, the more she can spot. Ant sized people rushing to and fro, crates and barrels standing at attention all over. The rib bones are covered in moss and trailing ivy, the color of every plant growing from the kaiju skeleton more blue than green.

“Have those plants killed anyone?” she asks into the headset they insisted she jam on her head before takeoff. It’s bulky and uncomfortable and it squeezes her ears; she doesn’t want to have it on.

The pilot doesn’t answer, focused more at the task at hand than on his passenger. Entrapta flops back in her seat, crossing her arms over her chest. He hasn’t answered any of her questions since they took off, posed to him in English and even her mangled Russian. She’s beginning to think her mic might be busted. Had the thought occurred sooner, then at least she would have had something to do with her hands while she was being ignored.

But it’s too late now. They’re beginning their descent.

Once the helicopter touches down, Entrapta doesn’t wait for the go ahead: she unbuckles her harness and shoulders her way out of it, slipping the headset off of her head like it’s offended her in some way.

She steps out onto the tarmac, olive green rucksack stuffed full of her worldly possessions heavy on her shoulder. The blades of the helicopter are winding down above her head, but the noise is still much too loud for her ears, a steady _thwump, thwump, thwump_ that pulls her pigtails in the wrong directions.

Water splashes up with every step she takes, sloshing over the tops of her boots. Everything smells of salt and oil, gulls screeching overhead. The wind cuts through her PPDC issued overalls like a knife, chilling her down to the bone. She allows herself a moment to take it all in: the clear sky, the unobstructed view of the Pacific stretching out as far as her eyes can see, the looming skeleton of the kaiju above her.

The tall, imposing woman in military garb striding toward her. She carries herself like she’s in charge, and from the way the workers hustle and bustle out of her way, Entrapta supposes she must be the Marshal of the Etherian Dome.

“I’m Entrapta!” she yells over the noise, adjusting her grip on the strap of her bag. Her eyes flit everywhere but the woman in the military suit, trying to drink it all in. This Shatterdome is her home now, so very different from the one in Russia, but still so very much the same.

“Marshal Brightmoon,” the woman introduces. Her voice is raised, but she doesn’t have to shout to be heard. The noise from the helicopter has faded entirely, replaced by the susurrus of the sea and the mechanical noise of the machinery at work on the tarmac. “Welcome to the Etherian Shatterdome, Dr. Dryl. I have heard great things about you.”

Entrapta bites down on a laugh, choosing instead to adjust her grip on her rucksack. _Great things_ is boilerplate terminology where she’s concerned, comparable to calling a kaiju a _small problem_. “Just Entrapta,” she corrects, having never been called doctor a day in her life.

The Marshal’s pale pink hair shifts with the wind as she offers up a small, strained smile. “Entrapta, then. Welcome. I do hope you enjoy your stay.” She straightens up, drawing herself up taller than she was before, a task Entrapta had hoped impossible. “Walk with me, allow me to show you around.”

They depart the tarmac for the Shatterdome proper. The Marshal isn’t one for idle chatter, which Entrapta appreciates, though her rucksack feels like it grows heavier with every step she takes.

The mess hall is the first location visited, followed closely by the barracks, thank goodness. Entrapta’s shown to her bunk, a small room with a bed and hardly enough room to turn around in. It isn’t much, but it’s hers, and it’s quite a bit warmer than her bunk was back in Russia. She drops off her hundred ton rucksack in the corner and meets the Marshal back into the hall. Later, once she’s gotten her bearings, she’ll unpack her meager belongings and spread herself out into the space.

They’re off again, down through the halls of the barracks and into an elevator that smells like seaweed and rust. The Marshal presses a button and the elevator groans to life, carting them downwards as though the very act is a chore.

Entrapta bounces up and down on the balls of her feet as she waits for the elevator to finish moving. She doesn’t know where the Marshal is taking her next, but she hopes they’ll go to the K-Science labs. The labs are all she’s been able to think about since she was told she was being transferred to the Etherian Shatterdome, an entirely new frontier for her to discover.

The elevator lets out a ding that’s reminiscent of a dial-up tone and the doors shudder open. Entrapta lets out a squeal of delight at what lies before them, flouncing out of the lift before the Marshal has a chance to move.

The room she steps into is cavernous and huge, filled to the brim with people and showers of sparks, the tang of ozone sharp in the air. Entrapta takes a deep breath, taking it all in, the atmosphere of it all anchoring her being down to her bones.

The world’s defence against the Kaiju, massive beasts that rise from the sea hell-bent on destruction, stand still in their bays. The jaegers hold Entrapta’s attention, rapt, from their plate metal armor to their hydraulic joints all the way to their digital cores. The giant robots are the only things standing between the human race and ultimate destruction, the Rangers who pilot them verifiable heroes.

Rangers have always been a dime-a-dozen to Entrapta, a blink-and-they’re-gone kind of commodity. Replaceable enough to keep them safe from the Kaiju. But the jaegers?

The jaegers have always been Entrapta’s true love, ever since she saw her first one on the television at fifteen. Since she first got her hands on one at nineteen. The jaeger’s ignited a fire in her that can’t be put out, a passion that burns so brightly it eclipses nearly everything else. She can name almost every one of them, active and decommissioned alike.

Forsaken Phoenix, one of the first American jaegers deployed, sits in her bay, stripped down to the bare bones of what makes her a jaeger, all exposed wiring and hydraulic joints. She’s a ruin of what she used to be, capable of protecting nothing. Her signature scarlet painted plating is missing, nowhere to be found, radioactive core exposed to the bay.

Beside her, the Marshal shifts on her feet. “We’re upgrading her to Mark Three,” she says by way of explanation.

“That’s an overhaul,” Entrapta remarks, watching J-Tech crews scurry around on the catwalks. It would be easier to build an entirely new machine, to start from scratch rather than rebuild a ruin that had a good run. It would be better to make the machine go digital rather than add a shield around the existing nuclear core.

Entrapta’s pretty sure the Jaeger Program isn’t completely out of funds, but she doesn’t ask.

The Marshal motions to the jaeger in the bay next to Forsaken Phoenix, clearing her throat. “That one is Grayskull’s Honor— she’s currently without pilots. And the one next to that is Glory Horizon, whose pilots I’m sure you’ll run into eventually. Spinerella and Netossa are always lending a helping hand when and where it’s needed.”

The Marshal lapses into silence for a moment as Entrapta drinks in the other two mechs. She’s seen videos of both of them in action, had watched in a mix of awe and horror as Grayskull’s Honor’s pilots had been killed by a kaiju on it’s last drop nine months ago.

“Shall we go to the K-Science labs?” Marshal Brightmoon prompts.

Entrapta shrieks, joyful.

✮

The Pan Pacific Defense Corps is making him share his lab.

_His lab._

Hordak would much rather cut off his own leg with a dull table knife than allow someone else into his work space. Letting them in means sharing the equipment he’s worked so hard to keep up to spec, it means misplaced tools and messes, sharing raw data he hasn’t had a chance to look over. It would mean more noise, and weird smells, and a billion other things to break his focus. It’s the potential of contaminated samples, of mislabeled vials, and a hundred other things that make him break out into hives.

And then there’s Imp to consider. Whoever the PPDC sends could be allergic to cats, might throw a fit at the idea of one in the lab. But Imp goes wherever Hordak goes; he has all the proper clearance necessary for the support animal, and Imp knows how to behave in a lab. How to behave in _his_ lab.

It’s a terrible idea, all around. He had argued with Marshal Brightmoon for days in an effort to get her to change PPDC’s mind.

“The Secretary General _insists_ ,” the Marshal had informed him primly during the last spat. “Dr. Dryl is one of the brightest minds the PPDC has to offer, and the Etheria Shatterdome will be lucky to have them. End of discussion.”

And now his three days are up, and the clock is telling him it’s ten minutes past fourteen hundred, which means the transport has arrived. By tomorrow, his pristine lab won’t be his anymore. It will be a shared space, no longer a liminal place for him to lose himself to.

The clock keeps ticking, counting down to the end of the world as he knows it. His fate was sealed the minute the Marshal opened her mouth with the news.

Hordak takes a deep, calming breath, the way his PPDC mandated therapist has advised him to do time and again when he feels like the situation is slipping away from him.

The clock ticks away.

Imp yawns from his perch on the desk, tail tucked neatly over his paws, completely ignoring the meltdown Hordak is having.

The reinforced doors to his lab slide open and Hell comes strolling in, hands tucked neatly behind her back. In her shadow treads his doom, purple pigtails bouncing every step of the way as an endless chatter emits from her mouth.

Hordak frowns, tightening his grip on his cane. She’s . . . not what he expected.

He doesn’t stand as the Marshal comes to a stop before him, one last small rebellion before everything changes. The corners of the Marshal’s mouth tighten downward, fine lines appearing in her forehead, and there’s a spark in her eyes that speaks of danger. That he’ll pay for this later, in some small way that’s sure to hurt. Perhaps his monthly shipment of coffee beans will mysteriously end up lost in the mail. His scalpels might all end up dulled at the same time. The keys on his keyboard might all end up rearranged from standard qwerty into some indecipherable code. The possibilities are endless and many and petty, and none of them are beneath Angella Brightmoon.

The Marshal clears her throat and steps to the side, so he has a better view of the invader. She’s dressed in black overalls and big boots, and her pigtails look as though they belong more on a school girl than a renowned scientist working in a K-Science lab.

“Dr. Kur, this is Dr. Entrapta Dryl,” Marshal Brightmoon introduces, motioning at the space between the two of them. “Entrapta, Dr. Hordak Kur, lead scientist of Research and Development here.”

Joy. One of the brightest minds the PPDC has to offer, and she looks like she’s maybe twenty. If he’s generous.

He isn’t feeling particularly generous at the moment.

“Angella, that is a twelve year old in a jumpsuit.”

“I’m thirty three!” the Actual Child informs him brightly. “Everything is so clean! Did you just get here too?”

Her voice grates on him. Makes him feel unsettled. “No,” he snaps at her, voice sharp. He turns his ire back to the Marshal who regards him coolly. “You cannot be serious, Angella. Cut my funding, give me a smaller space to work with, make your spawn my assistant, _anything_ but this.”

“This is non-negotiable.” Angella’s tone brooks no argument. “The orders come from over my head; take it up with the PPDC.”

Hordak taps his cane against the concrete floor of the lab, chewing on his tongue. There are many uncharitable things he could say in response, each of them dancing just behind his lips.

He simply frowns harshly at the Marshal, a furrow of lines forming between his brows.

“Is this your cat?”

His attention shifts immediately from his battle of wills with Angella to the newcomer who stands near his desk, studying Imp curiously. The cat studies her back, tail swishing lightly across the surface of the desk.

Imp, he has found over the years, is an exquisite judge of character. The cat likes approximately no one but him, and makes the fact very clear whenever possible. But he displays no outward signs of aggravation he normally does when a new person enters his sphere—no laying back of his ears, no growling, no baring of his teeth. Simply a delighted, soft narrowing of his eyes and the ever gentle sway of his tail.

Betrayed on all sides, it seems. “Yes, that is my _support animal_ ,” he huffs out, dismayed by Imp’s soft behavior. To her credit, the young woman doesn’t reach out and lay a hand on the creature, but does take a small step back at the words.

Angella clears her throat, drawing his attention and ire back towards herself. “Just give it a few months, Hordak. Perhaps then, you’ll have changed your mind. Maybe the situation will grow on you.”

“Six,” he agrees, at length.

“Pardon?”

“Six months,” he repeats. “And then we renegotiate.”

✮

Entrapta knows she’s messy.

She can’t help it, okay? Her mind works at lightspeeds, and her hands can’t always keep up. Things slip through the cracks, piles are made, tools are lost to the vastness of time and space. Emily helps where she can, but a scale-model AI controlled Jaeger can only do so much.

But she’s trying. Trying to keep things tidy, the mess mostly contained to her half of the lab. It’s the least she can do, since her lab partner had gone through all the effort of making it pristine before she arrived. He’d even gone so far to tape off her half, nice and neat with the most fluorescent shade of yellow she’d ever seen!

And, well, Hordak seems like a dude who likes his own space, and who likes things a certain way. She can respect that. She _gets_ that. She likes things a certain way, too! Her food has to be tiny, her drinks sugary, her explosions extra explodey.

Trying isn’t always doing, though. Sometimes she gets caught up in her own head, so focused on her latest project or the datasets or simulations that everything else falls to the wayside. Things start to pile up, get lost to the void, and disappear completely if she’s not careful.

But she’s been really careful since arriving in Etheria! She’s been mindful to keep to her designated side, and to keep her piles of paperwork and research mostly organized, and to even clean her blackboard erasers when she’s done using them! She’s making an effort!

Except.

Except her lab partner still frowns at her every time he walks into the lab with his kitty. He narrows his eyes over the tops of his glasses every time he catches sight of her from across the lab during the day when they’re working. He won’t speak a word to her, bad or otherwise, and she’s beginning to think he doesn’t like her.

Which is just bizarre, because she’s been trying so _hard_ to be a good lab partner. She hasn’t brought food into the lab even once (yet)! She hasn’t crossed the tape! None of her experiments have yet to result in a mandatory three-day shut down of the floor! As far she’s concerned, she’s doing wonderfully.

It’s just. You know. New shatterdome, half-way across the world. No friends. She had thought things would be different, that she would fall into place here more easily than she had at the Vladivostok shatterdome, especially without a language barrier.

Instead, Entrapta finds herself trudging up the three floors to the mess hall by herself, tablet in her hands as she runs through a complicated equation. The jaegers’ plasma cannons only hold so many charges, and she thinks it just isn’t _enough_ , that they need to be able to release more energy should the need arise.

She’s more focused on the tablet than her surroundings when she steps into line, muttering to herself. The muttering continues even as the tablet is tucked into the pocket at the front of her overalls and she grabs a tray, paying little mind to small servings of food she piles onto it.

She’s nearly at the end of the line when a voice breaks through her concentration. “Hey, Entrapta!”

Nearly spilling her food, Entrapta whips her head around trying to find the speaker, train of thought entirely derailed. Her eyes light on a dark skinned teen standing only a few feet away from her, sweat glistening at his temple. He’s dressed in the same slate-gray uniform most of the Shatterdome is garbed in, though the jumpsuit has been tied off at the waist and his undershirt has been chopped off in favor of a midriff baring top.

“I’m Bow,” he introduces, a little breathless. “Would you like to eat lunch with us?”

Entrapta only sees one of him, and the mess hall is mostly empty at this hour, but this is the first human contact that she hasn’t been the one to initiate since arriving at Etheria. She isn’t going to correct him for there not being an us.

“Okay!” she agrees, readily, because her other option was picking a table to eat alone at.

Bow looks shocked at her readiness but he recovers quickly, flashing her a large smile. His smile radiates a warmth and kindness she hasn’t felt since stepping foot in the Etheria Shatterdome, and he turns and leads the way to a table in a corner, occupied by a girl who looks to be about his age. She’s never been good at guessing people’s ages, but if she had to hazard a guess, she’d put both of them at around seventeen.

Entrapta settles herself down at the table, tray filled with small portions of what the mess hall has to offer set before her.

“I’m Glimmer,” the girl says around a piece of apple. “The Marshal is my mother. You’re the new K-science geek?”

“Glimmer!” Bow hisses, mortified. Entrapta’s too busy munching on her tiny spoonful of mashed potatoes to answer. “Entrapta’s responsible for most of the weapons developments we’ve used against the kaiju in the last decade! Show a little more respect!”

Glimmer just snorts and shakes her head, pushing her peaches around on her tray. “You’re the new _scientist_ my mother’s gone on about?” she tries again, glaring out of the corner of her eye at her friend. “Where’d they pull you from?”

“Yep!” Entrapta answers, mouth finally clear. “The Vladivostok Shatterdome in Russia.”

“What’s a Russian K-science goober doing in America?” Bow chokes on the bite of food he’s just taken, eyes bulging as he glares at Glimmer.

Entrapta laughs, stabbing her fork into the peaches on her tray. “I’m from Indiana.” When it became clear the kaiju were here to stay, their attacks every six months like clockwork, people had flocked from the west coast to the flyover states they had once derided. But Entrapta, who had grown up on a farm with corn as far as the eye could see and sky bluer than a camera could properly capture, had run toward the aliens and the giant robots humanity had built to stop them the first chance she had.

“Oh,” Glimmer says in a disinterested tone. Bow takes immediate offense on Entrapta’s behalf, putting his eating utensils down like he’s preparing for a fight.

“Entrapta is part of the reason we’re winning against the kaiju!” Entrapta isn’t sure she’d call it _winning_. More like _surviving._ “She built the first plasmacaster the jaegers use in her parent’s backyard!”

“That was the second one,” she corrects. “The first one I built blew up the barn. It was also much smaller.”

“Why would you build a bigger one when the first one exploded?” Glimmer sits up a little straighter, some of her earlier hostility melting away.

Entrapta blinks, thinking the question over. She doesn't have a good answer, so she just shrugs, her shoulders coming up around her ears. “Science,” is what she offers up, because to her it explains everything.

Glimmer looks to Bow, searching for a better explanation, or at least an explanation of the explanation Entratpta has provided. But Bow is nodding his head, agreeing with the single word Entrapta has provided.

“You are the most brilliant inventor of your generation,” he tells her, sincerity lacing his voice.

Entrapta smiles and thanks him before taking another small bite of her mashed potatoes, pleased to have found someone at last in this shatterdome that sees her for who she is.

✮

His concentration had been interrupted by a small _pop_ yet _again_.

Hordak spins away from his HUD station, lips twisted into a snarl, fingers clenched into fists. It was hard enough to concentrate on mounds of data before he was forced into sharing his lab with a jaeger gremlin, but now he finds it nigh on impossible, what with the near constant crashing and banging from the opposing side of the lab.

It will be at least another week before his noise cancelling headphones arrive. He awaits their coming with baited breath, like some maiden awaiting their beau in a mid-eighteenth century period piece. Until then, he doubts he can get any actual work done.

Entrapta stands at the exam table that sits on his side of the lab, just barely over the tape that bisects their halves. In her hands is a sphere of some sort, made entirely of scrap metal and electrical wiring

“This is Emily!” she shouts, setting the armadillo-like contraption down on the exam table. She presses something on the back of the contraption, a square of sorts, and the little thing springs to life. It unrolls into a tiny robot, two arms and legs and tiny round head, and it lets out an excited little beep. “She’s an AI controlled jaeger!”

Hordak purses his lips, casting a critical eye over the tiny robot. It resembles a jaeger only in the loosest sense, an assortment of scrap parts painted green and two LED lights that glow purple for eyes. It beeps at him excitedly, then waves its arms in the air before turning to the lab invader.

“How . . . quaint,” he offers up, wary.

It’s going to be a long, long few months. He isn’t sure he’ll be able to make it, all things considered, not without blowing up at least once. The grip he has on his temper is flimsy at the best of times, and this isn’t the most ideal situation.

Imp hops up onto the exam table with a chirrup, tail waving in the air as he sniffs at the small device. The robot—he can’t bring himself to call it a jaeger, it’s much too small to earn even a tenth of the title—thrusts a hand out with an excited beep, and Imp jumps, tail puffing up.

Entrapta watches the exchange closely, muttering under her breath all the while. Hordak doesn’t catch a word of what she says, but knows none of it’s meant for him anyway.

Imp twitches his tail and, content the robot is not a threat, bats it once squarely on the head before hopping down from the exam table and trotting back to his perch atop a stack of computer towers he’s claimed as his own. Hordak shakes his head and follows.

A long few months, indeed.

✮

Hordak is actually pretty cool.

He has yet to raise his voice in her direction, unlike any of the other lab partners she’s ever had, and that’s always a plus in her book. Plus the cable knit sweaters he always wears look super comfortable, and she’s always always liked to put comfort ahead of style. They’re probably really warm, too, which is a plus because the lab does get a little chilly, but it’s nothing like the chill of the lab back in Vladivostok.

Vladivostok was _cold_.

Plus, he hasn’t made a single complaint about Emily! Some people didn’t like that the tiny jaeger was underfoot back at the other dome, but Hordak has said nothing about her companion. Even his cat seems to like her!

Sure, the man has his eccentricities—the ever present redness of his bespectacled eyes, the way he’s dyed his hair kaiju blue, how he mutters violently to himself whenever he’s hunched over his HUD station glaring at a string of data that Entrapta can’t make out from across the room, for example. But he’s been nothing but civil to her thus far, even if he was more than a little hostile towards her on that first day.

Today, though, they have visitors, and Hordak is stiff backed in his office chair, glaring at them from behind his glasses. Bow and Glimmer and a blond teen that introduced herself as Adora stand awkwardly near the blast doors of the lab, all in the matching gray jumpsuits that make up the uniform of the Etheria Shatterdome.

“So, these are the head of the K-Sciences here,” Bow introduces. “Entrapta is more about the mechanics of the jaegers, and Dr. Kur specializes in the biology of the kaiju.”

From his seat, Hordak frowns, as though he disagrees with some part of Bow’s description.

Adora nods her head before asking, “So you guys are the mad scientists, then?”

Entrapta giggles, which turns into a snort before she says, “ _I’m_ the Mad Scientist! He’s just a scientist, who is mad.”

Hordak frowns harder, but it only proves her point.

“So,” Adora says cautiously, side-eying Hordak. “Why is this called the Fright Zone?”

Glimmer chokes on air while Bow makes a chopping motion near his throat.

“Not in front of _them_ ,” Bow hisses. Entrapta frowns, tilting her head to the side.

“Not in front of who? What?”

Glimmer laughs, awkward. “Oh, you know, just. A joke?”

“They like to call my lab the Fright Zone because of the experiments I supposedly do here,” Hordak announces, blunt as he stares down the teens. From the desk, Imp narrows his lamplight colored eyes. “What was the most recent rumor, then? Human-kaiju drifting? Or was it grafting kaiju parts with humans? Or was it, perhaps, attempting to grow my own kaiju in a test tube? Forgive me, I can only keep up with the rumor mill for so long when I have work to do.”

The teens stare at him with dinner-plate eyes, agog.

“Now,” he says, voice harsh, “if you’ll excuse yourselves, the adults have work to do. Monsters to slay, a world to save. Leave.”

Glimmer screws her face up, opening her mouth to fight back when Bow grabs her hand. Her mouth clamps shut, but she glares at Hordak nonetheless.

“Thank you!” Bow says, very loudly with false cheer. The smile he wears seems to strain his face.

Hordak turns back to his work, posture relaxing as he considers his participation in the conversation complete.

“Nice seeing you, Hordak,” Adora tosses out casually as the trio leaves the lab. Hordak stiffens over his work, back ramrod straight as Imp flicks his tail in the direction of the door.

Entrapta pauses for a moment, looking first at the closing door, and then back to Hordak.

There’s still so much more she has to learn.

✮

He has an unwanted visitor.

Most things these days are unwanted: the pain, the lab sharing, the kaiju, the ever thinning state of his hair.

Hordak goes so far as to remove his glasses, setting them down on his desk and turning right back to his work in an effort to ignore his company. Not that it helps, as now that he can’t see his company he can no longer see what he’s working on, either. The seemingly endless sets of data pulled up on the HUD are nothing more than blurry chicken scratch, meaningless neon squiggle.

“I know you can still see me, brother,” his guest says from over his shoulder, voice dry.

Hordak knows that if he responds, verbally or otherwise, the game is up. Acknowledging Hector is like acknowledging a train wreck; one simply cannot look away.

The back of his chair is kicked, and a shockwave of pain races through his leg, ankle to hip to ankle again. Hordak grits his teeth, intent on doubling down on his work.

Until the back of his chair is kicked again, harder this time, hard enough that Hordak nearly comes out of it.

“Hector!” he snaps ,whirling around in his chair. His twin lounges against a desk, arms crossed over his chest, looking for all the world innocent.

“What?” Hector snaps back, unfolding his arms and smoothing the creases out of his PPDC uniform. The stars that mark him as a general glitter when the light hits them, making Hordak squint a bit harder. “Put your glasses back on.”

Hordak obliges, snatching his glasses up and jamming them firmly on his face. His twin brother comes into focus immediately, mouth turned down at the corners, blond hair combed neatly back from his forehead.

They stare at each other, clock over the blast doors of the lab ticking away in the near-silence. It’s been eight months almost to the day since they’ve seen each other in person, four months and six days since they’ve video chatted.

“I have work to do,” Hordak announces, abrupt, once it’s clear Hector isn’t going to say anything. Hector’s green eyes narrow, and Hordak knows he’s walked into some kind of trap.

“ _Here_?” Hector’s voice is smug in it’s cruelty, dripping like poison off every word. Hordak’s hand tightens around his cane, the ache in his leg blooming. “In half of a second rate lab you have to share with some crazy little girl?”

Hordak keeps his mouth shut. He knows Hector is trying to bait him into doing something, _anything_ that could get him court martialed by the PPDC, anything that could result in him losing his already tenuous position within the Etherian Shatterdome. It’s a careful dance, the only kind Hordak can do anymore, and Hector is leading. Hector has always led.

It’s a bit like playing chicken without being able to see the other car, swerving at the last second and relying on blind faith that a collision won’t occur.

“Nothing to say? No witty repartee?” Hector picks up a specimen jar— kaiju liver portion in ammonia, several years old, will stink terribly if broken— and shakes it vigorously, frowning slightly at the bubbles that rise to the top. “You were much more fun when we were younger and you didn’t have to rely on mobility aids. It’s made you weak.”

He finally opens his mouth to snarl back when the buzzing starts. At first, he thinks it might be in his own head, an audible part of his anger. But he can see from Hector’s face that he can hear it too.

“Hey Hordak! I fixed the chainsaw!” Entrapta shouts from her side of the lab over the roaring of the small motor.

Ah, yes.

The _chainsaw_.

He had forgotten about it, really. The piece of equipment had failed him when attempting to cut through a piece of kaiju carapace earlier, sputtering to a stop and blowing smoke everywhere, so he had tossed it aside in a rage. She must have discovered it on the floor and decided to tinker with it, blasted woman.

Her welding mask is still down over her face as she adjusts the choke, noise of the motor deepening. Hordak could see what’s about to happen even if he weren’t wearing his glasses and takes two quick steps backward, out of the radius of immediate danger.

Hector isn’t so smart, nor so lucky, and Hordak isn’t about to warn him.

Entrapta descends on the carapace like a seagull on a french fry, cackling wildly behind her welding mask. The chainsaw bites into the carapace as though it were nothing, chewing through the hard outer shell of the kaiju.

And then she hits the blood sac and the blue blood of the kaiju comes squirting out in an arc, spraying all over Hector and his nicely pressed uniform. Hector goes rigid and gasps, as though he were dunked into ice water, kaiju blood dripping off of him and onto the floor in globs.

Hordak sees the shift in his eyes from surprise to anger, a seething rage that glimmers and gleams. For once it isn’t directed at him, and it worries him, because at least he knows how to handle it. Entrapta is too engrossed in her task to notice the danger, chainsaw in her hands ripping through the alien hunk on the exam table.

“I’d suggest you leave,” Hordak shouts over the chainsaw, propping his hip up against the desk. Hector’s attention shifts to him immediately, kaiju goop sliding down his jaw. “Go through HAZMAT protocols and whatnot. Wouldn’t want you coming down with kaiju blue.”

Hector flushes beneath the bioluminescent blood, color rising to his face as he stares Hordak down.

The chainsaw stops.

“I’ll be back,” he threatens, voice low, and Hordak knows that he doesn't mean today.

The quiet of the lab feels oppressive in the wake of Hector’s departure, kaiju blood _drip, drip, dripping_ thickly onto the floor. Entrapta sets the chainsaw on the exam table next to the dessicated kaiju sample, pushing her welding mask back from her face. Hordak slumps farther against the desk, fight fleeing from his body and most of the strength to stand on his own going with it.

“I thought you guys were identical twins,” Entrapta deposits into the quiet.

“We are,” he confirms, voice harsh.

“Then why are you shorter?” Hordak huffs out a mirthless, self-deprecating laugh, but he doesn’t give her answer.

There’s work to be done.

✮

Entrapta was fifteen when the first jaeger was successfully deployed against the kaiju Cragripper. Some news helicopter had thought it would be a genius idea to record the battle, and while the news crew did die mid-flight, Entrapta still has the recording that the news stations played stored on a jump drive somewhere.

Ancient Titan had been a Mark One jaeger, deployed straight from Los Angeles. Nuclear core with no protection for the pilots within the conn-pod, with so much armor plating on the outside it nearly resembled an armadillo. There were other problems, to be sure— the lack of plasmacaster, it’s limited array of weaponry, a lack of mobility. From an engineering standpoint, Ancient Titan was a wreck.

But somehow, the Rangers who piloted her managed to win the day. Entrapta still isn’t sure how—the recording cuts off before that part, but public record says that Cragripper was slain by Ancient Titan.

Now Entrapta gets to watch Kaiju fights from the LOCCENT Control Center within the Shatterdome, feeds playing video captured by the deployed drones. There’s a crush of people assembled, all of them answering to the alarm of the Category II kaiju emerging from the breach.

“Designation: Moltenback,” one of the LOCCENT techs calls out from their HUD station, tracking the kaiju as it emerges from the breach and begins to make its move toward the mainland.

“Hong Kong’s already scrambling,” someone else calls out. “They’re deploying Jade Empress and Xiaolin Showdown.”

“Stay alert,” Marshal Brightmoon orders from her perch on the platform in the center of the room, hands clutched tight around the railing. Entrapta knows, logically, that the Etheria Shatterdome is too far away to provide proper support should anything go sideways— the Tokyo Shatterdome would be the logical choice to scramble next.

The drones come online simultaneously with the cameras from the jaegers, providing a full view of the battle that’s about to ensue: it’s night in the South China sea, the water inky black and churning. The floodlights the jaegers are equipped with spotlight the water here and there, but there’s no sign of the kaiju yet.

Entrapta knows that this could take hours from here on out. Fights with the kaiju are always different, ranging anywhere from a quick takedown in a matter of minutes to a battle that takes ages. Every kaiju is built differently, each of them equipped with different abilities, but their goal seems to be the same: destruction of the human race.

Comm chatter sparks to life over the speakers, a blend of Mandarin and English. Entrapta only catches about half of it, but understands the gist— they don’t see the kaiju anywhere in the dark. The tension in LOCCENT ratchets up, something so palpable she can feel it on the back of her neck.

“Has it shown up yet?”

She yelps, nearly dropping her tablet as Glimmer materializes next to her, Bow and Adora in tow. Entrapta’s never seen any one of them without the other two since Adora arrived a few weeks ago, the three of them an inseparable trio whenever their schedule allows. She knows that Glimmer is the Marshal’s personal assistant, and that Bow is a J-tech in training, while Adora was recently transferred up from Los Angeles to go through compatibility tests with other jaeger cadets in the dome to become a Ranger.

“Not yet,” Entrapta answers, tucking her tablet away in her overalls.

No sooner do the words leave her mouth that there’s movement on the screen.

Moltenback rises behind the jaegers with an unholy scream, ink black water sluicing from its body in sheets. It slams into Jade Empress with it’s upper body, glowing mouth clamping down on the right shoulder of the jaeger and tearing into it. The arm comes off with a sickening shriek of metal and a flash of sparks, momentarily blinding the drones.

When the picture returns, Jade Empress is left standing with one arm, the other dangling by a single strand of muscle cord.

Jaeger’s were not built with speed in mind, and Moltenback is fast— likely the fastest kaiju Entrapta has seen, and she’s watched every jaeger deployment she’s been able to.

The kaiju disappears below the water again, leaving the jaegers standing. An excited flurry of Mandarin breaks out over the comms, none of which Entrapta understands.

The floodlights on the jaegers spotlight the inkdark water; the churning waves are too dense to see clearly past the surface.

Entrapta hardly breathes as she waits for the kaiju to resurface.

Jade Empress stays where she stands, arm dangling, other raised defensively. Xiaolin Showdown takes a few steps back, missile launchers in their chest primed and at the ready. The plasmacaster in their right arm glows blue with a waiting charge.

With a screech that sounds more like microphone feedback, Moltenback launches itself out of the South China Sea directly at Jade Empress again, coming back to finish what it started. The jaeger is ready for the attack, grabbing the giant monster by the throat. It’s barely enough to stop the beast, giant robot backpedaling a few steps in the water, maw of Moltenback snapping shut scant inches away from it’s shielded chest.

Xiaolin Showdown takes the opening for what it is. They launch their missiles, munitions landing in the hide of the kaiju with sickening thunks Entrapta feels in her chest. Moltenback screams, trying to wrench itself out of Jade Empress’s iron-like grip on it’s throat, but the jaeger doesn't give, launching their own missiles out of their chest.

The kaiju manages to rip itself free, leaving a hunk of flesh in the remaining hand of Jade Empress. It’s sides are heaving; it won’t stop screaming, sound grating on Entrapta’s ears a half a world away.

Xiaolin Showdown takes the opening, engaging their rocket boosters and closing the gap between themselves and the monster. They bring their arm with the plasmacaster up and punch down with it, burying it deep in the open wound that is Moltenback’s throat.

And then they unload the charges of the weapon that Entrapta had created, right down the glowing gullet of the alien monster.

All of the sound seems to drain from LOCCENT as everyone waits, breathless.

What seems like a lifetime later, someone from the Hong Kong Shatterdome announces, “Kaiju kill confirmed.”

Entrapta cheers with everyone else in LOCCENT, pulled into Glimmer, Bow, and Adora’s group hug.

✮

Hordak knew it would have to happen at some point.

He wouldn’t call it a habit, per se, more like an . . . _inconvenience._ He would get sucked into his work and ignore his body and eventually his body would fight back. Sometimes that looked like small naps at his desk, head pillowed on a book and glasses crushed up against his forehead. Other times, it looked like his legs giving out beneath him, crumbling to the floor in a dead faint.

Unfortunately, this time happened to be one of the latter.

He could feel the onset of it, as though he was blurring at the edges of himself, everything tinged with a hint of gray. But rather than listen to what his body was trying to tell him, rather than sit for a moment to rest and clear his head, he had decided to forge onward. But the kaiju wait for no one, the attacks coming every six months like clockwork, and Hordak knows he must keep going.

He just hadn’t expected to wake up in his office chair with a blanket wrapped around him and Imp in his lap. He hadn’t expected for the lights of the lab to be dimmed, or for the eerie quiet that has settled over the place. He certainly hadn’t expected for Entrapta, of all people, to be sitting quietly on the floor next to his desk, poking away at her tablet.

Shifting in the chair elicits a strangled groan as a sharp pain jolts up and down his left leg, drawing the attention of the purple haired woman.

“Oh good! You’re awake!”

“Unfortunately.” His mouth is dry. There’s a sharp pain behind his eyes, like someone’s going at him with knitting needles. Everything is blurry. “Where are my glasses?”

Entrapta hands them to him, and he’s disgusted to note that his hands are shaking slightly as he pushes them onto his face. He swallows, parched, and his traitorous mouth moves independent of his brain and asks, “Can I have some water?”

Entrapta stands to fulfil his request, putting her tablet away as she does so. She returns quickly, popping the cap off of a bottle of water and handing it to him, saying, “Can’t have my lab partner dying on me!”

“For the hundredth time,” he admonishes, exhausted, “we are not lab _partners_. We just share a lab.”

“And our research! Ergo, lab partners.” She sits on the floor beside his chair again, legs stretched out in front of her. Imp abandons him for Entrapta’s lap immediately, curling into a ball. Traitor. “Do you want me to call medical?”

“You haven’t already?” He’d expected to wake up there, after all. Not in his desk chair wrapped up in a blanket.

“Nope! Figured you didn’t want to be wheeled all the way across the dome in front of a whole bunch of people. I mean, I probably could have rigged some kind of propulsion system to your chair and told people it was an experiment, but! I didn’t think. You would. Y’know. Like that.” Entrapta’s voice loses some of its ever-present vibrancy as she prattles, hands wound in Imp’s nightdark fur, gaze steady on the ground.

She’s thoughtful in a way he hadn’t believed her to be. Thoughtful in a way that her actions and words don’t bely. It’s almost . . . touching, in a way he hasn’t felt in a while.

“Do you want me to call medical, or are you . . . good?”

In truth, he isn’t good. He hasn’t been ‘good’ in a very long time, and he won’t ever be ‘good’ again. But there’s nothing medical can do for him other than prescribe him bed rest and fluids, one of which Hordak will fully ignore. Today is wasted because of this incident.

“No,” he finally answers, at length. He takes another long drag off the water bottle, spinning around in the chair to locate his cane. “Don’t call medical. I can handle this myself.”

He gathers up his cane and the reserves of his strength, hooks the leash to his cat and stands. His vision blanks for a moment, black and then spotty. Leaning more heavily on his cane than normal, he abandons the blanket and shuffles away.

He’s at the doors when he hesitates. “Entrapta?”

A pause. A beat. A silence that stretches.

“Thank you.”

✮

Glory Horizon, like all jaegers, is a technical marvel. She’s one of the first to have a digital core, making her a Mark Four, and Entrapta can feel herself beginning to drool just thinking about her.

All the jaegers at the Vladivostok Shatterdome were Mark Ones and Twos, all nuclear, all so old and repeatedly repaired that they were practically cannibalized into new jaegers built around the same ancient cores.

Today, Marshal Brightmoon has given her express permission to inspect Glory Horizon, and Entrapta can hardly stop herself from vibrating with excitement. She’s never been near a Mark Four before! She’s read about them, sure. Watch them drop, seen them fight from LOCCENT, studied the schematics until she’s dreamt about them. But she’s never got to get up close and personal with one. It’s a dream come true.

She’s already been all over each of the legs and the arms with a fine tooth comb, inspected each limb as thoroughly as possible, as though Marshal Brightmoon might not ever let her do it again. She’s savored every moment, going over her first Mark Four, her first fully digital Jaeger.

If magic existed, she thinks it would feel a lot like this.

Inspecting the torso of the mechanical wonder takes more time than the limbs did, and she hums to herself as she traipses about the great metal catwalk that surrounds the jaeger. Entrapta checks every wiring connection, every nut, bolt, and screw, until she’s satisfied the giant metal robot is completely up to spec. And everything is up to spec, a testament to the work the J-tech crews do, except—

She frowns, then checks the wiring diagram against her tablet again. _That can’t possibly be right._

It isn’t.

“Hey!” Entrapta shouts, catching the attention of the nearest J-tech. Their welding masked face tilts up in her direction, and she takes it as the go a-head that she has their attention. “Why is cable subsection 72F hooked up to vent port 89C?”

The J-tech’s head lists to the right, questioning.

Entrapta sighs. “If _this_ cable grouping is hooked up to _that_ vent port, the core will reach critical mass in about fifteen minutes and cause it to act like an EMP. Do we _want_ the core of this jaeger to act like an EMP and shut it itself down while it’s fighting a kaiju?”

The J-tech shakes their head, welding mask swaying with the motion.

“Exactly!” Entrapta exclaims, ripping the cables out of the offending holes. They come out with a shower of sparks, pelting her overalls. She plugs the subsection into the proper ports, just two sections over from where she found them plugged in at, and really, who could make such a rookie mistake?

She makes an official note of it on Glory Horizon’s logs, then moves on, shaking her head, exasperated.

To think she worked with _professionals._

✮

The data is mindblowing.

It’s raw and messy, certainly, and it won’t be making headway into any journals or publications, or even within PPDC circles, but it’s mind boggling. To him. And he has to share it with someone— leaving it rattling alone in his head will do him no good; he has to get it out there, has to have someone to talk it over with, and he’s never really gotten on with other PPDC scientists.

They would probably laugh him out of their inboxes with this, anyway.

Stopping in front of the door he’s pretty sure is hers, Hordak takes a fortifying breath. He can’t believe he’s doing this, right now, but she’s been pretty insistent that he take the _partner_ in lab partner seriously.

Imp wends himself between his legs and chirps, as though telling him to hurry up.

Hordak leans against the doorjamb, shifting his cane from his right to left hand before banging on the door with his palm.

She doesn’t answer immediately, and each moment he waits feels like a lifetime.

He tries knocking again, pounding harder with the flat of his palm.

The locks tumble and the door swings open; for a moment, Hordak thinks he might have the wrong room. Entrapta never keeps her hair down (which falls to her waist and curls, just slightly, around her face), and she’s always in those damned PPDC issue coveralls (except for, it appears, when she’s in PPDC issued sweatpants with the cuffs rolled up mid-calf and one of her whiter tank tops).

The thing his mind sticks on is that she isn’t wearing gloves. Her fingers are short and thin a shade lighter than the rest of her, nails kept clipped and filed.

“Hordak?” Her voice is husky with sleep. _What time is it?_ “What’s wrong?”

“I-uh.” His mouth is dry. Her hands look soft. One of them is splayed out, open against the metal of the door, while the other is pushing some of her hair out of her face. “Uh.”

Imp digs his claws into the meat of his calf, sparking Hordak out of his momentary stupor. “I found something. In the datasets from the last few attacks.”

The sleep is gone from her eyes immediately, replaced by the boundless curiosity he knows so well. Entrapta is fully awake now, body practically humming with excitement.

“What?” she demands, any hint of sleep gone from her voice. “What is it? What did you find?” She looks down, towards his hands, and her mouth pulls into a frown. “You didn’t . . . bring it with you?”

“It’s in the lab.”

“You really need to learn how to use a tablet, Hordak.” It’s his turn to frown, eyebrows turned down over the top of his glasses.

“That’s neither here nor there.”

Entrapta shrugs with her whole body. “You could have brought the data to me that way.”

Hordak can feel his temper bubbling up just beneath his skin; he takes a deep breath, tamps it back down to a manageable level, back to where it won’t overflow and explode. “I didn’t. Can we go to the lab now?”

Entrapta perks up at the mention of the lab. She makes a shooing motion with her hands and Hordak backs up clumsily, nearly tripping over Imp and his leash in the process. She takes two steps out of her room and nearly has the door closed before Hordak notices a problem.

“Entrapta?” She looks at him. “Shoes?”

“Oh. Right.”

The small woman darts back into her room and returns seconds later with her boots on her feet, untied, laces stuffed over the tops of the boots. “To the lab!” she proclaims, slamming the door behind her. Hordak winces at the loud noise, the way it echoes up and down the empty hall, because it must be the middle of the night if he had woken up _Entrapta_ , of all people.

Entrapta talks a mile a minute on the way to the lab, but Hordak only half hears her— she’s talking about tablets, after all, on their uses and why he should be using one instead of the HUD system he clings to like a lifeline.

The lights of the lab flicker back to life as they enter the cavernous space, motion sensors detecting the movement. Everything is exactly as he left it in his rush to get someone who cared about what he had found— steaming cup of coffee sitting on his desk, stack of papers piled neatly before it.

Hordak drops Imp’s leash and the cat goes to his spot on the other desk. He himself goes to his own desk, dragging the extra stool with him for Entrapta. She follows, bouncing on the balls of her feet, hair swaying with the movement.

She looks like a stranger, out of the corner of his eye.

He settles into his chair and turns on his HUD, the machine booting up with a few clicks and a hum. Entrapta settles onto the stool next to him, elbows on her knees and chin expectantly in her hands. There’s a wide smile on her face, excitement practically brimming from every pore of her body.

It’s slightly unnerving.

“Here’s what I think,” he says, turning to his HUD. The last six kaiju are present as bright red blinking dots, spread out in the Pacific Ocean and adjoining seas. Dotted blue lines spread out from the blinking dots, headed out in various directions. Two of them meet up in the same location within China. “The kaiju seem to want something.”

Entrapta snorts. “Everyone knows they kaiju _want_ something. We’ve just been assuming it’s complete and total destruction of the human race.”

“I think they might be trying to terraform the earth.” He knows throwing it out there is a risk. That he only has the flimsiest data to prove it, the basest of a model, a vague hypothesis. He knows he’s taking a risk, even sharing this with her.

She stares at him for a moment, blinking. “Do you have anything that might back that up?”

Hordak sniffs. He is a scientist, not some jumped up lab rat with a fancy computer, thank you very much.

“Each time a kaiju makes it out of the water and onto the land, they appear to make a beeline for one very specific thing. While one has never actually reached their destination thanks to the jaegers, I believe their collective goal may be active volcanoes. Combined with the amount of radiation they give off, and the chemical make-up of their bodies, I believe that if a kaiju were to actually reach an active volcano, we could be looking at an extinction level event.” He takes a breath in through his mouth, then out through his nose, just like his therapist told him to in high stress situations. “I believe the kaiju are here to terraform Earth. And I think they’re going to use volcanoes to do it.”

Entrapta narrows her eyes at him slightly, and before she can say anything he says, “I even built a model.”

“You built a model!”

He presses a button on his HUD, and the red dots follow the blue lines; each of them tracking to an active volcano near where they were killed. Each is a hypothesis, each a pattern derived from the data he’s gathered from the last six attacks, each nothing more than a gathering of pixels projected in the air. But they’re also a hope, a potential answer to the question of _why_.

She watches the display carefully, light playing on her face and reflecting in her carnelian eyes; he watches her in turn, heart in his throat, waiting, waiting, waiting.

Finally, she reaches over and presses down on his hand, bare skin on bare skin. It’s the briefest of touches, the slightest bit of contact, but it’s more than enough to startle him. The model starts to play again, red dots blinking and blue lines spanning out.

“Your model’s convincing enough for me,” she says once it’s done. “But I don’t think there’s enough here for anyone else.”

“Anyone else would laugh me out of the lab.” He can’t seem to keep the sincerity out of his voice, though he tries.

Entrapta giggle snorts, pulling on a hunk of her hair. It’s still surreal to see the purple mass down, pig tails nowhere to be found. “What else are lab partners for?”

Hordak frowns at her. “We are not— I never said— This doesn’t make us—”

She laughs again, noise joyful. “You’ll accept that we’re lab partners some day, Hordak.” She places a hand on his shoulder, just for a moment, a there-and-gone-again glance of a touch. When she pulls back, he’s surprised to find he misses the warmth of it, however brief it was. “I’m going back to bed. You’ve given me much to think about! Terraforming! Volcanoes! Who would have thought!”

He watches her as she goes, hair swaying gently behind her. The lab is quieter without her, quiet hum of the machinery the only thing filling the silence. Imp chirrups at his feet, and Hordak looks down at the ink-dark cat.

“What?” he asks.

The cat yawns; he supposes it’s time for him to turn in as well.

There is one other thing Hordak has learned on this night:

Entrapta’s hands are soft.

It’s a feeling he takes with him to sleep.

✮

It isn’t her fault, this time.

She’ll swear to it.

Everything had been going fine! The scale plasmacaster was perfect, right down to the digital power source, completely to scale. Every connection had been secure, had been double and triple checked. Absolutely nothing should have gone wrong, she’s positive.

But it is a lab. And it is an _experimental_ scale plasmacaster. Experimental being the key word. Things can always go wrong with experiments; it’s why they’re experiments, after all.

But this one! This one shouldn’t have gone wrong, is the point. Everything had been perfect.

The explosion had happened anyway.

Allow her to back up, just a few moments:

Everything is perfectly normal. Hordak is in a bad mood on his side of the lab, muttering angrily over his HUD. Entrapta has her goggles on her face, world tinted purple as she goes over the plasmacaster one last time before she flips the switch. Everything looks to be where it should be, each wire perfectly placed, every panel shiny and new.

She’s pleased with herself, with the construction of the device. Now she just has to see if it does what she wants.

“Experiment number 46839,” she says into the old tape recorder in her gloved hand, holding it up to her face. She retreats away from the device she’s built, back into the lab to the power switch that lies on her desk. “Scale Model Plasmacaster. First test. Powering on in three, two, one . . . “

Entrapta flips the power switch to the on position, and squeals in joy when the plasmacaster begins to glow blue. A low hum fills the lab, small hairs on Entrapta’s arms raising with the energy that emanates from the machine.

She cackles into the tape recorder. “It’s working! The device has powered on, it’s radiating energy, it’s—”

All the air is knocked out of her, violently.

Around her, the lab shudders and shakes, tilts and inverts.

Then it settles.

Entrapta pushes Hordak off of the top of her, sitting up with a huff. Her goggles have been knocked askew, lenses cracked, thin line of blood trickling out of her nose. Smoke fills the lab, so thick and black she can hardly see through it, acrid smell clogging her nose and lungs. A siren blares, though the noise is muted, barely audible in her ringing ears.

The back half of the plasmacaster is missing, blown completely off. Nothing but a twisted wreckage of metal of wiring remains, smoking and most definitely on fire. She should probably get the fire extinguisher. She should—

There’s a groan, vaguely painful.

Entrapta looks over at Hordak and winces, recalling that she shoved him off. He’s just sitting up himself, gingerly, rubbing at his shoulder, blood on his face. She frowns; where had he come from, to end up on top of her? He had been across the lab, farthest away from the blast. Even in her addled state, Entrapta knows there’s no way he could have ended up on top of her unless—

Unless he had seen what she hadn’t, and tackled her to the ground before the explosion had occurred. His cane is nowhere to be seen. Neither is Imp. He looks dazed, confused, blood dripping down the side of his face as he sits in a pile on the floor.

She opens her mouth to say something, anything to Hordak.

The sprinkler system finally goes off, soaking Entrapta immediately.

She closes her mouth, knowing nothing she has to say is enough.

✮

The lab is shut down for three days for cleaning and inspection. It’s mandatory, routine, necessary after the incident with Entrapta’s scale model plasmacaster.

Imp is fine, of course. The cat wedged himself under the desk and hunkered down while Hordak went against his better nature and tackled Entrapta to the ground. A cut on his face and several nasty bruises on his body are all he has to show for it. He’s rattled, a little, but who wouldn’t be? While the explosion had caused no lasting physical damage, it had caused plenty to talk about with his therapist.

He hasn’t seen Entrpata since the incident. She’s made herself scarce, for whatever reason. The lab doesn’t feel quite the same without her there; it feels bigger, somehow. Colder.

His phone beeps with a message just as the blast doors to the lab open. Hordak spins around in his chair, curious; he rarely gets visitors.

Hector sweeps in, regal and imperious, blond hair swept impeccably back from his forehead. Hordak’s stomach sours immediately, as does his mood.

It’s only been five months since Hector visited last; Hordak could have gone longer without hearing from him. Many, many months longer, in fact.

Hector zeroes in on him immediately, slick smile creeping across his face. “Brother,” he greets.

Hordak harrumphs, turning back to his data.

“Really? I make a special trip all the way up to this blasted dome just to check on you, and this is how you greet me?”

“You could have sent me an email.”

“But you wouldn’t have responded to an email.”

“Exactly.”

Hordak doesn’t have to look back at his brother to know he’s frowning. It’s a given. He just stays focused on the data he has on hand, doing his best to ignore his twin.

But it’s hard to ignore someone who won’t be ignored.

“You know,” Hector says, conversationally, “I tried to warn you several months ago. Don’t you remember? When I was last here? She’s crazy. Bonkers. Only has about half of her marbles. Isn’t working with a full deck.”

Something dark and feral ignites in him, and it takes every ounce of will Hordak has not to stand up and get in Hector’s face.

He thinks instead of Entrapta’s soft hands. Of her annoying laugh. Of the wounded, sad look she gave him once she realized what she had done four days ago, just after the explosion.

Then he thinks, _Oh. I might be in love with her._

The realization isn’t startling, in and of itself. It would have happened sooner or later. He just wishes it had happened later, rather than when he’s staring down his twin, trying to keep his temper in check.

He’ll come to terms with it later.

For now, he tells his twin in a clipped voice, “It was an accident. These things happen.”

Hector laughs, though there’s little humor in it. “And how many more of those are you going to tolerate before you demand a change, brother? How many more until she gets you killed?” When he doesn’t respond, the blond twin changes tactics. “I’ve seen her record. This isn’t the first lab ‘accident’ she’s caused, you know. You’re not the first bystander who’s been hurt. How many more are acceptable?”

Hordak finally turns around on his wheely chair, awful squealing noise emanating from the base. “Get out of my lab,” he enunciates, pushing his glasses farther up the bridge of his nose. “Or I may just get the chainsaw again.”

Revulsion flickers across the other man’s face. “Fine. I can see where I’m not wanted. But just remember what I’ve said, brother. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

He checks his phone as Hector retreats; it’s a message from Marshal Brightmoon.

_Hector’s here._

Hordak can’t help the snort that escapes him. It’s a little late for _that._

✮

She feels awful about what happened. She’s never felt like this after an incident in the lab before.

But she’s never had a lab partner before, either. And no one’s ever willingly pulled her out of the path of a blast, or shielded her body with theirs.

Emotions, she concludes, are complicated. Science is much easier.

Trying to figure out why her scale model plasmacaster decided to blow up, on the other hand, is middling ground. All the data was transmitted from the device to her tablet, from the time she flipped the switch to the time it blew up, but she hasn’t touched it yet.

She hasn’t seen Hordak since the incident, either. She’s been avoiding him, and the lab, altogether. What do you say to someone who’s done what he did?

Emotions! Complicated!

At least she hasn’t had to face—

Hordak walks into the lab.

She freezes; her eyes go to the large clock that hangs over the blast doors. It’s seven AM.

It’s seven AM! She’s been here all night!

He pauses at the sight of her, Imp’s tail waving like a flag in the air. The doors whoosh gently shut behind them.

“Good morning,” Hordak says, awkwardly, after a long pause.

She swallows past the lump in her throat, averts her eyes. There’s a cut on his face, partially healed, that she can see from across the lab. Bruising she can spot from that far away as well, purple-black-blue against the pale of his skin.

“Good morning,” she finally forces back, just as awkward.

He stares at her a moment. She’s never been good at reading people, so she doesn’t try. Then he nods slightly, a little bob of his bruised head, and shuffles farther into the lab to go about his day.

Entrapta turns back to her work, poking at the screen of her tablet, eyebrows furrowing her forehead. Raw data is one of Entrapta’s favorite things to sift through, easy to get lost in and filled with endless possibilities. She falls into the rhythm of it, analyzing every string. Nothing looks out of place.

Her stomach growls. Loudly, almost as though it’s possessed. She freezes, full-body going into rigor, startled by the ferocity her stomach seems to possess. When was the last time she ate? She can’t seem to recall. Hordak has a pretty strict no-food-in-the-lab-unless-it’s-liquid policy, and she doesn’t recall dinner, so . . .

Lunch? Yesterday? Maybe?

She thinks about ignoring it when Hordak speaks up and says, “Shall we go get breakfast?”

It throws her for a loop.

“What.”

The man is looking at her from his half of the lab, reclined in his lab chair, steaming mug of coffee in hand. He takes a long draught from the mug before repeating, “Shall we go get breakfast?”

It’s exactly what she thought he said.

She taps the power button of the tablet out of habit, and the screen goes black. She is hungry, and it is breakfast time. Where’s the harm?

So she agrees.

They leave the lab, and doubt creeps back in at the end of the hall. The bruises and the cut look worse up close; her stomach turns over. They reach the elevator in silence, Hordak pressing the button to call the metal death trap.

“Listen, Hordak, I—”

“Don’t.”

Her head jerks up, confused.

“I don’t require an apology. What happened isn’t your— you didn’t— it wasn’t your fault. It could have happened to anyone.”

“Oh.” Entrapta scrapes her teeth over her lower lip, wishing the elevator would arrive faster. “Okay.”

The doors to the lift shudder open, but Entrapta can’t leave the heavy feeling behind as they board. Hordak seems to be in a weirdly cheerful mood, and she wishes she could share in it, but the lab accident still drags heavy at her mind. The elevator ride to the mess hall is subdued and quiet, Entrapta’s fingers itching to curl around her tablet she has stashed in the chest pocket of her overalls.

The elevator is merciful and doesn't break down on her as it has before, letting them out on the floor with the mess hall with a low-throated ding, doors creaking open with a geriatric squeal. One of these days she’s going to go to town on the elevator and completely overhaul it, she swears.

Hordak motions for her to exit the small metal space first and she complies, slipping into the surprisingly empty hall. He follows, and they walk side by side the short distance to the mess hall, the only noise between them Hordak’s cane thumping against the metal walkway.

The mess hall itself is mostly empty, breakfast rush over nearly an hour ago. People are scattered here and there throughout the cavernous room, mainly dining alone, only noise breaking up the silence utensils scraping trays.

There is no line to speak of to get food; Entrapta loads her tray up with small portions of a little bit of everything, from bacon to sausage to the scrambled eggs that she knows are made from some kind of powdered mix. She avoids the pancakes, both because they are large and because they taste like reheated plastic.

Hordak takes three, with syrup.

Finding an empty stretch of table is simple and Entrapta sits down across from Hordak, fishing her tablet out from her large pocket. She pecks at her food, bird-like, as she unlocks the device, lines of data rolling out across the screen.

It isn’t long before she finds the answer, glaring out at her from the screen of the tablet, plain as day. She would have noticed it immediately had the guilt of the accident not stopped her from looking at the data sooner.

“It overheated!” she exclaims around a mouthful of food, waving the tablet over her head. She pauses for a moment, swallows, then repeats, “It overheated! The plasmacaster! That’s why it exploded! There was too much power, and it overheated!”

Hordak frowns around his spork as the tablet is waved in his face, glasses slipping down his nose. “And does that change anything?” he asks, once his mouth is clear.

“Yes! Because now I can fix it! And it won’t explode again, although you have to admit, the last one was pretty awesome.”

He frowns, bruises pulling down with his mouth. From his place on the bench next to him, Imp caterwauls, noise fearful.

Entrapta slowly lowers herself back down to her seat, setting her tablet on the table. “You’ve made your point,” she tells the cat, who quiets slowly, noise winding down like an old firetruck.

She wants to get to work immediately. To leave the table and her food behind and get back to the lab; her hands are itching to get busy, to pick up her gear and rebuild the plasmacaster from the ruins where it stands.

But Hordak was kind enough to invite her to breakfast; is kind enough to sit down and eat with her, even after the lab incident. No one back in Russia would have done that. No one back in college had done that. That Hordak is willing to overlook her nearly blowing up the lab and himself getting injured in the process means a lot.

So she eats.

✮

Hordak has, for the most part, dedicated his life to fighting the kaiju in one way or another. For the past half dozen years or so, it’s been as a scientist, studying kaiju anatomy and getting his hands on any piece of their carcasses that he can. He’s let nothing distract him from his goals, allowed nothing to tug him away from his need to save mankind from the aliens invading from the bottom of the ocean.

But lately, he’s noticed he’s been getting . . . distracted.

He blames Marshal Brightmoon, of course, for making him share his lab in the first place. If she had just listened to him at the start, had taken his protestations into consideration, then none of this would be happening to him. He could be focusing! Getting more work done! In his quiet, big, lonely lab. A lab he could call his own.

Instead, he’s sharing it with her. With _Entrapta_. Whom he may or may not be in love with. He’s really not sure. He doesn’t have anything to compare these things he’s feeling to. His whole adult life has been dedicated to fighting the kaiju with little time for anything else. And it isn’t like he has time for anything else now, either, but she’s.

Well.

Entrapta.

And it’s hard to put her into words.

It’s hard to put her into anything, really; she keeps crossing the tape he’s put down separating their halves of the lab. Spare parts, her AI controlled mini-jaeger, various tools; they all end up on his side of the lab eventually, spread out like they share the space. It only mildly annoys Hordak anymore. He understands that she can’t seem to help herself.

He’s taken to ignoring her intrusions onto his side, mostly.

Except for right this second.

Entrapta has him backed up against one of his desks, weighty look on her face and ever-present tablet nowhere to be found for once. There’s maybe a foot of space between the two of them, personal space nowhere to be found; she’s so close he can see the flecks of brown in her rose colored eyes.

“I have a question.” She’s very serious when she says, “It’s for science.”

“Science,” Hordak repeats distractedly. She’s so close he can smell the oil used on the jaeger joints, the faint smell of burned hair from her earlier lab mishap.

“Yes.” She doesn’t break eye contact when she asks, “Can I kiss you?”

He thinks his heart might stop.

“It’s just, I’ve never kissed anyone before and I’ve been thinking about it, lately, and I figured I’d ask you because, y’know, you _understand_ science and you make me feel comfortable. I can ask someone else! If it makes you feel uncomfortable!”

It would be selfish and stupid for him to say yes. But this might be— probably _is_ — the only chance he’s going to get to know what it’s like to kiss Entrapta Dryl.

Either way, he’ll be a fool.

“I, uhm.” He nods. Swallows past the lump in his throat. Can feel sweat collecting at the base of his spine. “I. Yes, okay.”

He stares at her expectantly, awkwardly, unsure of what comes next.

The seconds tick by, analog clock over the doors of the lab audible in the silence.

She laughs, and it takes him a moment to realize she isn’t mocking him. “Not right now! We’re working! Later, Hordak!”

His entire body deflates with the realization that he’s going to have to wait. He braces his palms against the desk behind him to keep himself upright as Entrapta flounces back across to her side of the lab, weak in the knees at the thought of what he’s just agreed to.

He’s consumed by the thought of kissing for the rest of the workday.

The fact of the matter is, Hordak has never kissed anyone either, except for some boy who’s name he can’t recall in the fourth grade. His whole life has been consumed by the kaiju, leaving little time for anything else, and interpersonal relationships fell by the wayside.

What if he messes this all up? Screws up so badly, somehow, and Entrapta never wants to speak to him again? He’ll have to put in a transfer request, of course, go somewhere other than the Etherian Dome he’s called home for the past half decade plus or so. He could always go back to Los Angeles, but that’s where Hector’s stationed, and he would rather be no where near Hector; perhaps Alaska. He has enough sweaters to go to Alaska.

Maybe he shouldn’t have been so quick to say yes. Perhaps he should have thought about the consequences, and what saying yes meant beyond just kissing her, because actions always, always, _always_ have consequences.

Yes. Alaska sounds lovely. He’ll put his transfer request in now, before anything can go horribly wrong, and the Marshal should hopefully approve it before the end of the workday, and then he can—

Imp sinks his claws into the meat of Hordak’s bad leg, tail thrashing back and forth. Startled, Hordak can’t help the quiet yelp that escapes his mouth, or the way he jumps in his chair and nearly falls out of it.

He glares at the cat, who simply sits back on his haunches and licks his chops, as though he didn’t just commit bodily harm.

“You’re insufferable,” he tells the cat, point blank. “That hurt.”

✮

Entrapta’s not worried about anything.

It’s an _experiment._

✮

He’s going to throw up.

He’s going to throw up, he’s pretty sure.

Entrapta unlocks the door to her room, tiny body hauling it open before she steps inside and invites him in, chattering away about the scale model plasmacaster she’s been busy rebuilding from the ground up. Hordak steps inside the small space and shuts the door behind him, lock sliding into place automatically.

He involuntarily gulps at the sound, wishing they hadn’t stopped by his room moments earlier to drop Imp off.

Entrapta’s room is roughly the same size as his: small, with barely enough space to pace in. The walls are bare, though several pairs of overalls identical to the pair she’s wearing now are piled in one corner. Her desk, pushed into the opposite corner, is covered in bits and bobs of spare mechanics; the whole room smells of the oil used on the jaegers, blended with something uniquely Entrapta.

He feels as though he’s invading, even though he’s been invited. This is her personal space, somewhere he has no right to be.

Why, oh why, did he agree to this?

“Sit on the bed and get comfortable,” Entrapta instructs, shucking off her gloves and throwing them on her desk, interrupting his inner turmoil.

Hordak finally looks to the one place he had been studiously avoiding: the bed. It’s a narrow twin, identical to his own, and he’s willing to bet money that the mattress is equally as lumpy and uncomfortable. There is a quilt draped over her bed, handmade, cheery yellow, white, red, and purple squares interlocking with each other to make some kind of pattern. It looks old and well worn, and he can spot the beginnings of a few holes as he approaches.

Leaning his cane up against the night stand, he sits on the bed. It’s just as lumpy as his own, the standard PPDC issue as much as everything else is in the Dome.

A moment passes before he decides what to do, exactly, with his legs: he pulls them up onto the bed, tucking one up beneath him as best he can and leaving the other sticking out in front of him. It’s the only comfortable position he can think of, with his back up against the wall. All that’s left for him to do then is wait, agonizingly, for Entrapta. Every second he has to wait drags by slow like wet sand in an hourglass, bottlenecking at the chokepoint. He breathes deep, counts backward from ten with a _Mississippi_ between each number, does little things to keep himself calm.

Reminds himself, again, that he shouldn’t have agreed to this; can’t help the thrill that goes up his spine when he remembers that he did.

The bed shifts, and he startles slightly; Entrapta is crawling onto the mattress, old tape recorder she records all of her experiments on in one bare hand. She pauses on the edge of the bed, fiddling with the device; announces, “Experiment number 47328 is about to commence,” then proceeds to set the device on the nightstand.

He gulps, having forgotten about her obsession with recording her experiments the way she does. It’s far too late to back now, even if he wanted to.

“Ready?” she asks.

 _I should have brushed my teeth_ , Hordak thinks.

He keeps his hands at his sides, fisted in the quilt as she crawls into his lap, knees knocking into his. She straddles his hips, hands on his shoulders, face tilted towards his, and goodness, when did the room get so warm?

Her lips touch his, just the barest hint of contact, and he thinks he might fall apart. He goes completely still, terrified to move, afraid he’ll scare her away even though this was her idea in the first place. She presses her lips more fully against his, but still he won’t respond.

Entrapta pulls back an inch or so, opens her eyes; says, “This won’t work if you aren’t going to kiss me back, Hordak.”

“Right.” His voice is hoarse. He fights the urge to reach up and fiddle with his glasses, choosing instead to keep his hands fisted up in her quilt. “Uhm.”

She gigglesnorts, breath ghosting against his lips, and a moment later her mouth is back on his, demanding and heavy. He hesitates for only a moment before kissing her back, uncertain of the mechanics of it all. His stomach is doing a weird swoopy thing, flip flopping up and down.

Their noses touch; teeth clank together, painful. Kissing Entrapta is what Hordak imagines discovering gravity was like: wondrous, awe-inspiring, tastes a bit like apples.

He brings a hand up to cup the back of her head, deepening the kiss, fingers tangling in her hair. One of her hands comes up to rest against the side of his neck, thumb pressed into the hollow of his throat. She bites down on his lip and he moans, adjusting his grip.

She pulls back again and he finds himself chasing after her, hungry. Ravenous.

“Hordak,” she says, voice whisper soft. “I—”

A klaxon blares, high and shrill.

Reflexively, Hordak grabs Entrapta by the hips—

And shoves her off, into the wall, startling them both.

They stare at each other as a voice comes over the loudspeaker and announces, “Activity detected in the Breach. All hands, report to stations. Rangers, to your Jaegers. We repeat, all hands, report to stations. Rangers, to your Jaegers. The Etheria Shatterdome has been activated.”

Entrapta scrambles off of the bed, bowling over Hordak, an excited mess of limbs and pigtails. “Kaiju!” she squawks, the word tumbling out from her kiss bitten lips. She swipes her gloves off of her desk and tugs them on, throwing a look over her shoulder at Hordak. _“Kaiju!_ ”

Helpless, hopeless, Hordak follows Entrapta out of her room. The hall outside is a crush of people, everyone rushing to get to their stations. They join the crowd, slipping in like fish swimming upstream; Hordak sticks to Entrapta like a limpet, never allowing anyone between the two of them, following her close.

Technically, they don’t have a station to report to. They’re scientists, and their posts are down in the K-Science labs. Their roles happen before and after the kaiju attack, not during. There is nothing for them to do but sit on their hands and wait while the kaiju are attacking, nothing for them to do but watch as the Rangers do their job.

He avoids LOCCENT like a plague for good reason. He’s never liked watching the kaiju fights with large groups of people around him, always preferred to watch the highlight reels the Marshal handed to him after the fact in the safety of his room with Imp by his side.

LOCCENT is a crush of people, and Entrapta fights her way through the moving crowd with practice. Hordak steps into the empty spaces she leaves behind her, following close, and the empty space behind him is swallowed up as soon as he moves out of it. They end up in the very center of the room, right where Hordak thinks would be busiest, but he’s surprised to find that it’s the calmest spot.

Of course, the Marshal’s offspring and her crop-top adorned friend join them soon after, chattering excitedly at Entrapta. Hordak has no idea what there is to be excited about— it’s another kaiju, and while the Etherian Dome has deployed their jaeger’s this time, it’s nothing to get excited about. He supposes Adora is a competent enough jaeger pilot, though he doubts the results now that she’s been stuck in a jaeger with Catra.

His stomach flutters with nerves, somehow even worse than they’ve been all day. His palm is sweaty on his cane; his other hand is shaking, and he shoves it into the pocket of his pants.

“Marshal on deck!” someone shouts from the mouth of the room. The nerves in his stomach solidify into dread, sweat slick on the back of his neck.

Marshal Brightmoon strides into the room, radiating grace and power. Everyone stops in the middle of what they’re doing to drop a quick salute to her, and then it’s right back to work. The only ones who refrain from doing so are himself and Entrapta, scientists as they are.

“Where are we at?” she demands as she takes up her post at the raised center of the room, long fingers curling over the railing. Her eyes settle on Hordak standing directly below her, one eyebrow delicately raising in question at his presence.

He scowls at her.

“It’s a Cat III, ma’am. Designation Agitator. Roughly 90 meters in height. Greyskull’s Honor and Glory Horizon are fully integrated and on their way to the drop point, neural handshakes holding steady. Confrontation estimated to occur in roughly thirty minutes.”

Hordak swallows, mouth dry. It’s another thing he doesn’t like about the kaiju incursions—all of the waiting. There’s so much waiting. Waiting for the kaiju to fully emerge from the breach, waiting for the jaegers to deploy, waiting for the two many stories-tall enemies to clash.

Waiting, waiting, waiting.

And the worst part is, Hordak has nothing to keep himself occupied during it all. His tongue feels like lead in his mouth, and he feels like he can’t reach out to Entrapta even though she’s standing only a few feet away from him. The techs in the room are busy, bustling to and fro, calling out statistics and coordinates and the status of the kaiju.

Finally, after what seems like a lifetime of the ache in Hordak’s leg intensifying, one of the JumpHawk pilots announces, “Kaiju spotted. Disengaging Jaegers.”

On the big screens in the room, the drones begin to pipe in video, just in time to watch the jaegers splash into the Pacific, slate-gray saltwater displacing in waves. Glory Horizon’s plasmacaster already glows with the bright blue of a charge waiting in the cannon; Greyskull’s Honor stands at the ready with their sword drawn.

The kaiju has six arms and a wide, flat head covered in spikes. It’s double mouths are opened wide in a screech that reverberates over the microphones, spiny teeth trembling with the noise.

There’s no hesitation as Glory Horizon surges forward to meet the monster, one hand burying itself in the throat of the beast while the other with the plasmacaster unloads into it’s stomach. Greyskull’s Honor is only seconds behind, bringing their sword down in a chopping motion as they hack at one of the kaiju’s arms.

The kaiju screams in pain, reeling backward, away from the jaegers. The giant robots don’t let up, following deeper into the Pacific, rocket boosters engaging. Glory Horizon queues up another charge in their plasmacaster just as Greyskull’s Honor succeeds in taking off one of the kaiju’s arms.

Another thing Hordak doesn’t like about watching kaiju fights in real time: they could take hours.

The kaiju howls in pain, flailing all five of it’s remaining arms. It gets lucky, landing heavy blows on both jaegers, sending the giant robots reeling backwards into the ocean. Designation: Agitator doesn’t let up, taking it’s chance, bounding forward through the thick salt water and pouncing on Glory Horizon. It hammers down blows with it’s remaining arms, each point of contact enough to dent the jaeger’s plate armor.

Glory Horizon doesn't fight back.

“Glory Horizon, do you copy?” the Marshal calls out above the cacophony of noise in LOCCENT.

They don’t get a reply.

Greyskull’s Honor re engages her rocket boosters again, closing the gap between themselves and the kaiju in the blink of an eye, leaving a wake of glowing blue water behind them. Their sword is raised above their head, ready to strike.

The jaeger freezes.

“Greyskull’s Honor? Do you copy?” There is a splinter of worry working its way into the Marshal’s cool demeanor. “Glory Horizon? Are you there?”

“Neither of the jaegers have power!” the tech reports, voice shaking. “They’re— they’re completely offline! Comms are down!”

“Remote restart is not working either, Marshal! They’re sitting ducks out there!”

Onscreen, the kaiju continues it’s assault on Glory Horizon.

The air feels as though it’s gone completely out of the room. The urgency is there, but Hordak feels as though he can’t breathe. In his pocket, his hand has turned into a claw.

His skin feels like it’s crawling; he looks over his shoulder to find the Marshal’s pale eyes on him again, calculating. His stomach turns to lead.

He really, really wishes he hadn’t followed Entrapta, now.

Angella stares him down, tipping her chin into the air. “Hordak,” she says, voice silencing the room.

He grits his teeth. “Absolutely _not_ ,” he bites out, pain shooting up his leg at the very thought of what she’s about to suggest.

“Get in the fucking robot,” she orders anyway, because she outranks him in all the ways that matter.

There isn’t any point in arguing with her; an order is an order, and this is an emergency. Even he can see that.

“Mother!” Glimmer objects, voice strangled. “You can’t just _drift_ with the _creepy doctor_!”

“Dr. Kur is more than just creepy, but I don’t have time for your antics, Glimmer,” Marshal Brightmoon admonishes. To the J-techs in the room she says, “Ready the Phoenix.”

Nobody moves.

“Now!” Marshal Brightmoon shouts, slamming a hand down on the railing.

Hordak is the first to move, shuffling toward the door, cane hitting the floor with a resounding _thud_ with each step. His actions set off a chain reaction throughout the room, setting everyone else into motion.

✮

Entrapta puts down Experiment number 47328 as inconclusive.

She makes a note that it needs repeating.

✮

Hordak has made a point to avoid the Drivesuit Room, but finds himself rushing toward there now nonetheless. Angella stalks next to him, hands fisted at her sides as though she’s prepared to take a swing at the next person who questions her decision.

The Drivesuit techs are ready and waiting for them, fresh sets of circuit suits already on hand. The Marshal looses her tie with one hand and starts in on the buttons of her uniform with the other.

He leans up against the wall as he strips down, acutely aware of what the Drivesuit techs see: his scrawny, pale limbs, the way his left leg trembles and struggles to hold up his weight, the Lichtenberg figures that cover his chest like a spider web. He chucks off his sweater and his undershirt, throwing them in a ball on the floor, and then works his way out of his pants, kicking them off once they reach his ankles.

The black circuit suit is skin tight, molded to his form perfectly. He feels odd in it, exposed in a way he didn’t feel when he was stripped down to just his underwear.

Hordak limps over to his spot on the floor, limbs loose and leg aching, and the drive suit techs jump into action, standing in front of and behind him. They begin to encase him in the dark purple drive suit, one holding the pieces in place and the other securing the pieces of the suit to his body.

The spinal piece is attached once the rest of the suit is on him, and it feels like someone pouring cold jelly down his back. Next to him, Angella is fully suited as well, a warrior queen readied for battle.

They put their helmets on, a mechanical click as they attach to the suits. And just like that, in less than the seven minutes the drive suit techs are alloted, the two of them are suited up for deployment.

Angella doesn't spare Hordak a look as she marches from the Drivesuit room into the short hall that leads to the Conn pod. He limps after her, having to leave his cane behind; there is no place for canes in Jaegers.

“Are you certain this is a good idea?” he finally asks as the techs secure them into their cradles. Angella’s mouth is a harsh line in the light of her helmet. Her hands go through the pre-flight motions mechanically, drilled into them both despite the years of not being inside of a jaeger. “We drifted together once, twelve years ago, on a dare from Micah.”

“It’s our only option,” she informs him in a clipped tone. “This, or we lose two Ranger teams waiting for another base to scramble.”

Hordak can’t argue with her logic. He can’t argue with her, period, trussed up and locked into the cradle as he is. The time for arguing is long past, and he missed his chance to do it like he misses his chance for most things.

The techs leave the conn pod, sealing the door shut behind them. A chill goes down his spine, anticipation making him shudder. A press of the button and the conn pod releases, hurtling downward through open space until it connects with the body of Forsaken Phoenix, jostling the Marshal and scientists locked into the cradles.

“Initiating neural handshake,” Angella announces to techs on the other end of the comms once they’ve settled.

Hordak braces himself.

The drift greets him cruelly, grabbing him by the ankles and dunking him down into an ice flow. He sucks in a breath through his teeth, bites down on the inside of his cheek hard enough that the tang of blood fills his mouth.

_A purple dress, more tulle and taffeta than satin. A thick, gooey beat that reverberates through her chest. Hands on her shoulders as her date stands an awkward distance away from her, the dance’s chaperones watching them like hawks. An undercurrent of tension fills the room, thick enough to cut with a knife. Why they’ve bothered with Prom when nothing is normal, she doesn’t know, not when San Francisco has fallen, not when there’s—_

_His brother's cruel smile as he pushes him down into the mud in their backyard, gray sky above him as raindrops fall gently on his face. “You’ll never be as good as me,” Hector taunts, looking down on him. The mud is cold against his skin; his chest burns where Hector pushed his hands into him. He can’t breathe, he can’t—_

_The once in a lifetime attack happens a second time, this time in Hong Kong, and a righteous fury bubbles up in her chest. She knows well before the monster is slain, four and a half days and countless lives later, that it won’t be the last. That taking days to slay a monster is simply unsustainable. That—_

_The third Kaiju hits Manila, and the remote hangs loosely in his hand. All he can do is stare at the beast in morbid curiosity and wonder what the exact chemical make-up of it’s blood is. How big the heart is, and where it’s located, and how much blood it can pump per second. Or is it so big that it needs two? And just how—_

_She holds the jacket in her hands, methodically studying the careful stitching on the back._ Forsaken Phoenix _is emblazoned there proudly, but she’s still hesitant to put the blasted thing on. Micah pokes his head into the room, rogue grin on his face as he says, “It’s not going to bite you, Angella. Not like--”_

Ancient Titan _is massive. It towers before him, all plate armor and nuclear core, and all he can do is stare up in wonder and think,_ How did I get so lucky? _Hector stands beside him, arm slung over his shoulders. They’re jaeger pilots, the first of their kind, Earth’s last line of defense against the alien invaders. It’s—_

_Micah and she breathe as one, rain falling in torrents across the viewport. There’s a kaiju out there somewhere, but their jaeger is badly damaged, left arm dangling by a cord. It’s the side Micah control’s, but Angella can feel the pain as though it’s her own, ripping through her body. Forsaken Phoenix’s proximity sensors blare, the conn-pod is breached, and—_

_The pain doubles, then quadruples, folding over and over unto itself. It echoes over and through the bond, a feedback loop feeding on itself, a snake eating its own tail. A different jaeger, a different kaiju, a different partner. The conn pod has been compromised. He hangs in the cradle, screaming, body on fire as electricity courses through his chest. His heart stops, his lungs seize up, and he dies._

They breathe in as one as they step out on the other side of the drift, hands fisted at their sides. They breathe out, hands relaxing, two people shuffled together like two opposing stacks of cards.

“I don’t like this,” one of their mouth’s says. A hand reaches up and flips a switch; another reaches up to press a button.

“ _Neural handshake holding steady at_ ,” a voice says into their ears, tinny. The speaker whistles, and they flinch at the pitch. “ _Holding steady at ninety seven percent_.”

“Get over it,” their other mouth huffs. “Left hemisphere calibrating.”

“It feels too deep.” A beat, and then, “Right hemisphere calibrating.”

“ _Hemispheres calibrated_.”

“Quit whining.” They bring their hands up and the jaeger complies, banging it’s knuckles together.

“ _JumpHawks are go. I repeat, JumpHawks are a go_.”

✮

Entrapta finds that her hands have wound themselves up with Glimmer’s and Bow’s without her knowing. Her stomach has found its way into her throat, heart pounding in her chest like a drum. She’s never been this nervous during a kaiju fight; has always watched with a glee she reserved for science and experiments and gameboy games.

Then again, she’s never personally known one of the Rangers piloting a jaeger, not the way she knows Hordak.

Which brings her back to Hordak himself. Hordak, a Ranger? He certainly hadn’t argued when the Marshal ordered him into the Phoenix. Hadn’t even looked back at her when he left LOCCENT, which stung a little. And he had sounded calm, if a little irritated, over the comms that were piped into the room. Nothing like the grumpy scientist she thought she knew so well.

Meanwhile, the kaiju known as Agitator has halted it’s assault on Glory Horizon. One of the Rangers in Greyskull’s Honor had detached themselves from their cradle, found a flare gun somewhere, and made it to the outside of the jaeger. They’ve attracted the attention of the kaiju with the flare gun, drawing it away from the other jaeger.

Entrapta knows that the second the kaiju makes contact with the jaeger, the Rangers standing on top of it are done for.

✮

They smack the release button in unison, cables holding them to the JumpHawk’s releasing with audible _snaps_.

The free fall lasts only seconds and rather than landing in the Pacific, the Forsaken Phoenix lands directly on top of the kaiju known as Agitator. A bulkhead in the left leg breaks open immediately, water rushing in, setting off an alarm.

They grit their teeth, rocking violently in their cradles at the force of the landing.

Beneath them, the kaiju writhes. They raise a fist and pound down on the crown of the beast’s armored head, breaking off of a few of the protective spines. The kaiju screams and twists, bucking them off and into the water.

They sink. Water covers the viewport, rushing over.

They don’t panic. They’ve been here before, under the drink. Get one foot under them on the ocean floor, then the other, and then they’re upright, giant mech head breaking the waves.

The kaiju has gone back to targeting Greyskull’s Honor, lumbering back toward the jaeger with a single mindedness only giant alien reptiles seem to possess.

Inside the conn pod, the Rangers lift their right legs in unison, then their left. The jaeger complies, sloshing forward through the Pacific and toward the monster.

But one of their legs lags behind them as they move, a liability.

 _A weakness_ , one of the Rangers thinks.

 _No,_ the other Ranger counters, voice harsh over their drift bond. _Never a weakness_.

Together, they bring up their right hands, palms open. Their jaeger does the same, plasmacaster glowing the bright blue of a readied charge. They unload into Agitator’s back and it hits, directly between the shoulders of the lowest set of arms.

Agitator whips around, the fastest it’s moved since emerging from the Breach, Greyskulls’ Honor once again forgotten.

Kaiju meets jaeger in a clash of flesh and metal; the plasmacaster unloads another two charges into the upper-most shoulder of Agitator, tearing clean through the arm and sending it into the ocean.

The kaiju scream-roars directly in their robot-face, spittle flying and covering their viewport. A giant fist connects with their left side, hard enough to knock the air from their lungs and make them grit their teeth. More sirens blare, on-board AI burbling another warning about the hull being compromised.

They punch back, engaging the rocket in their elbow to add a little extra kick. Another charge, their final one, is loaded in the plasmacaster, and they unload it into the kaiju’s soft stomach as soon as it’s ready.

The kaiju takes a step back, reeling.

The Rangers in the Forsaken Phoenix take their opening, bearing down on Agitator, grabbing it by its lower jaw with one hand and punching it in the head with the other. The kaiju bites down on their hand, wraps it’s four remaining arms around their middle and squeezes.

Gritting their teeth through the pain, they stick their free hand into the mouth of the kaiju.

With a hand on either jaw, they engage the boosters in the elbows again; the gauges go critical, warning sirens blaring.

A sickening rip, and the kaiju is in two pieces, bright blue radiation blood slicking their hands. The arms around their middle go slack.

Relief floods across the drift, chased closely by exhaustion. The sirens are still blaring, gauges still critical; the Phoenix was never meant to take this kind of damage, should never have been deployed in the first place. But the Marshal gets what the Marshal orders.

Their fists loosen, dropping the kaiju pieces back into the Pacific from whence it came.

“Kaiju kill confirmed,” they say into their comms. “Repeat: kaiju kill confirmed.”

“ _We read. Confirming kaiju kill. Go ahead and head back to the dome, Forsaken Phoenix. We’re sending Jumphawks for the others_.”

✮

Entrapta thinks Glimmer might have broken her hand, squeezing it as tightly as she has.

✮

Coming out of the drift is like surfacing from under an icy river and taking the first real lungful of fresh air. It’s dizzying, to be in his own head again, disorienting to know he had opened himself up, peeled back every layer of himself and willingly shared it with another.

Extricating himself from the cradle is all muscle memory, and he breathes easier once he’s out of it. Next to him, Angella has done the same, hands moving mechanically.

They have the door to the conn pod open and are on the catwalk leading out by the time any of the J-tech crews reach them. Below, on the floor of the jaeger bay, a cheer is going up; the rest of the dome has assembled to hail the returning Rangers.

He used to like this part. The adoration. The attention. The way people would look at him, after he saved the world again. As though he were some kind of hero.

As though he’s still some kind of hero.

Now it all just makes him sick to his stomach.

Thankfully, he’s able to extricate himself quickly, Angella barking orders and clearing the way as she goes to check on her injured Rangers. Hordak limps out of the jaeger bay with the distraction, hurriedly pressing the elevator button repeatedly as though doing so will speed up the ancient lift.

He leaves without being noticed.

His legs finally give away from beneath him in the Drivesuit Room. That he managed to stay upright for that long is a miracle unto itself.

He slides shakily to the floor, helmet in his hands, sweat cooling on his face. His mouth is dry, and his leg is killing him, and what he thinks might be blood is leaking out of his nose. He isn’t sure; he doesn't think he has the strength in his arms to reach up and check. His lungs feel like they can’t get enough air into them, and each breath comes shallow. Behind him, the wall is the only thing keeping him upright.

Closing his eyes for a moment, he slips off the edge of wakefulness and into the liminal space between wakefulness and sleep. The pain in his leg ebbs and flows with every beat of his heart, sharp and fading and sharp again.

“Hiya, Hordak!”

His eyes fly open, head jerking to the side as he startles out of his half-awake state to find Entrapta standing before him, bent in half with a hand on her knee. In her other she holds one of the drills used on the drive suits.

“Entrapta,” he states dumbly, blinking up at her.

“I had no idea you could pilot a jaeger!” she chirps brightly, dropping to her knees and pressing down on the drill lever testingly. It whirs to life with a _bzzz_ and Entrapta grins, manic.

“It has been,” he says haltingly, “a very long time since I drifted.”

Entrapta works quickly on the various bolts that keep the driftsuit plastered to his body, each of them coming apart with a pop that makes it just a little easier to draw breath. It’s no time at all before she’s prying the drivesuit off of his torso completely, lovingly setting the tech up against the wall before she goes to work on the next piece. He complies every time she goes to move a limb, entire body feeling like nothing more than dead weight.

They don’t speak as she strips him down to his circuit suit, actions methodical even as she bumps into his personal space, side of her face mere inches from his own. She smells like the lab— like burnt out fuzes and ozone and burnt metal. Their interrupted experiment feels like it was decades ago, the hint of her lips against his merely imagined.

Once she’s done, she leaves him for a moment to put the drill away, and the loss of her is a loss of warmth. He wants her body pressed back against his own, craves it like he craves his morning coffee.

She comes back momentarily, drill-free, but with his cane. “Do you want the circuit suit off, or on?” she asks, holding out a hand.

He takes it, and she hauls him up and hands him the cane. His entire body feels like one giant bruise. “I would rather wait to change.” Walking to his room in the circuit suit will be awkward, but most of the Dome will still be occupied by the aftermath of the kaiju incursion and the consequences of nearly losing two jaegers.

The hike back to his quarters is uneventful, passing only a handful of people who pay them absolutely no mind. Every step feels like he’s trying to walk through molasses, as though he’s still in the jaeger trying to fight in the water. Entrapta doesn’t speak, uncharacteristically quiet, teeth worrying at her lower lip.

His body feels as though it’s quaking by the time they reach his quarters, and it’s a fight to stay upright as Entrapta unlocks his door. It’s a fight to keep his eyes open. Imp is waiting for them inside, a chirping, curious ball of dark fur.

Entrapta ushers him inside and he nearly trips over the threshold. He manages to stay upright through some miracle, as though this day hasn’t already been stuffed full of them.

“You okay?” Entrapta asks, stepping into the room behind him and closing the door. He’s glad that he remembered to put all of his clothes away this morning before he left.

“Yes,” he bites out, a little harsher than he intends. His nerves are completely frayed; he feels as though he could fall apart at any moment.

He sees Entrapta’s throat bob out of the corner of his eye, and regrets the tone of his voice immediately. But it’s too late to take it back now.

“Right. I’ll, uh. I’ll leave you to it, then.” Hordak wants to kick himself, but his foot’s already in his mouth. Entrapta leaves his room without looking back, door shutting and locking itself softly behind her.

Wrestling his way out of the circuit suit, he tosses it onto the floor, not caring where it lands. He’s had more than enough of this day.

He’s asleep before his head hits the pillow.

✮

Entrapta doesn’t have to dive deep to find old Ranger interviews. They’re everywhere on the web, only a search away, entire sites dedicated to them based on country of origin or jaeger type. There’s sites dedicated to the Rangers themselves even, fanbases built up around these men and women, veritable hero worshippers who have collected every bit of data on their obsession of choice and posted it to the web for all to find.

Locating Hordak on one of them isn’t hard, but for a moment Entrapta’s almost sure they have the wrong Hordak.

The Hordak on the web looks . . . odd. He’s pale, sure, but smug. Healthy. Not in a sweater. There’s a cold look in his eyes even in the photos, so much so that she thinks she might be looking at wrongly tagged photos of Hector instead. His hair is pale blond and slicked back, not the Kaiju blue she knows so well. It’s unsettling.

Scrolling down a bit lists some useful information. His Ranger partner is listed as _Kur, Hector (twin)_ , and their Jaeger is listed as _Ancient Titan_ , and a pit forms in Entrapta’s stomach. She remembers the day Ancient Titan fell, recalls watching in horror from LOCCENT in Vladivostok as the jaeger simply stopped moving, not even budging as their kaiju opponent descended upon it and rended it apart. Everyone had their theories as to what happened that day, but as far as Entrapta knows, the records concerning the incident are still sealed.

The rest of the stats reads out:

_Drops: Six_

_Kills: Five_

_Base of Operations: Los Angeles Shatterdome_

Then his height and weight are listed, both numbers much higher than what she suspects they are now. Further down on the page are embedded videos of various interviews from Ancient Titan’s hayday; Entrapta makes sure the volume is up on her tablet before clicking on the first one, curious.

It takes a moment for the video to buffer, and when it begins playing, there’s two Hector’s on the screen, both of them sneering, both of them dressed in the dress uniform of the PPDC. For the life of her, Entrapta can’t tell them apart; they slouch the same in the stage chairs, their mannerisms are identical, and even their voices sound the same as they speak with the late night host. They’re mirror images of each other, so identical Entrapta could almost swear they were created in a lab.

She doesn’t pay much attention to any of the words exchanged; she’s more focused on the younger, healthier Hordak, the one she never knew, the one who looks so sure and full of himself. He’s handsome, she supposes, in a different way than he is now. But the words that come out of his mouth don’t sound like Hordak, they sound like someone else entirely, like someone she doesn’t know.

The next few videos are much the same, to the point that she can’t tell Hector and Hordak apart when they speak unless the host makes it a point to specify which is which. She thinks of the only time she’s met Hector, the General who she accidentally covered in kaiju goo, of how angry he was; Hordak could never be that angry, no matter what she did. And she blew up the lab!

On a whim, she puts in a request for the sealed records of Ancient Titan. She’s been in the PPDC long enough, has enough weight to throw around, that it’s nearly a shoe-in that she’ll get them. And then she turns off her tablet, and her comm, and every other electronic device within arms length before tucking herself tight into her bed.

It’s been a very, very long day.

✮

Hordak sleeps for three days.

When he wakes, finally, Imp is furious, yowling and hissing at him like he’s done some terrible misdeed. Hordak knows he’s been fed and fed well, as Entrapta had built him an automated feeder weeks ago.

He feels like he’s been put through the spin cycle on a washing machine, entire body one large aching pain. Everything about him feels as though it’s been moved an inch or so to the left, as though everything is still there but forever changed. Like he’s left the room and everything has been shifted every so slightly in his absence by an intruder.

Crawling out of his bed is a challenge, the concrete floor cold beneath his bare feet. He shoves his glasses onto his face, throwing his room into sharp relief. The circuit suit that he had tossed carelessly onto the floor is missing, and the clothes he had worn into the drivesuit room are folded neatly and placed on the chair he keeps in the corner.

Evidence points to someone being in his room, invading his space, but he finds that he can’t bring himself to care at the moment. Instead, he forces himself to his feet and into the shower to wash the grime and sleep from his body.

When he’s out and dressed, he slips Imp’s harness onto the still angry cat and trudges out into the hall, stomach growling. He can’t recall the last proper meal he had, let alone when he had it, so he slowly makes his way to the mess hall.

Everyone he passes gives him an odd, sidelong look, and it doesn’t improve any when he reaches the half-full mess hall. The steady burble of conversation stops entirely when he enters the room, stone dead silence meeting him. Hordak does what he does best--ignores everyone and steps into line, tray in hand as he waits patiently to dish up. Slowly, the noise of the room builds up again, a buzz against his ears.

Once his tray is piled with more food than he recalls eating at any point in the recent past (and oh, his stomach is growling, why is he so starved?), he finds a mostly empty table and sits himself and Imp down at it, the cat folding himself into Hordak’s lap with a huff.

He’s midway through his meal when an obnoxious laugh draws his attention to mid-way down the long stretch of table. He looks to find the Marshal’s daughter sitting some thirty feet down, surrounded by her friends, mouth open in mirth and eyes closed, face pointed towards the heavens.

Suddenly, he has a nearly undeniable urge to hug the girl.

He pauses for a moment, taken aback. Waits, sorting through his emotions, trying to ascertain which are his.

Then he squeezes his juice box so tight it pops, sending a shower of apple juice all over him and the rest of the table, causing his table mates to squeal in surprise. He doesn’t apologize, standing stiffly and abandoning his meal altogether as he stalks out of the mess hall and towards the lift, grinding his teeth.

He has to find Angella. The Marshal has much to answer for, forcing him into a jaeger at the top of his list, this remnant of the drift that clings to him like a ghost a close second. He knows where she is instinctively, like a homing beacon has been installed in his brain, and he heads straight for her office as quickly as he can, leg and hip protesting the whole way.

Drifting without being hooked up to the neural interfacing, or Ghost Drifting, isn’t entirely unheard of. But it typically doesn’t happen after a single drift; this special form of hell was typically only reserved for partners who had drifted together for years. He and Hector had never been subject to it, thankfully.

Hordak raps on the door precisely once when he arrives, then lets himself in. Angella looks up from her desk, face thunderous as a storm; the look relaxes only slightly when she realizes it’s him. She sets down her pen, reshuffles her paperwork into a neater pile, folds her hands neatly in front of her after motioning for him to sit.

Folding himself unceremoniously into the chair across from her desk, he says, “I have a problem.”

He can feel a trickle of her mirth through what remains of their drift bond. “ _That_ is my problem,” he says, a little manic, voice cracking at the end.

The Marshal purses her lips for a moment. “What’s a little emotion load sharing between acquaintances?”

“A problem, Angella. It’s. A. _Problem_.”

“Something you don’t want me to know, Hordak?”

“I had the sudden urge to hug your _daughter_.” Angella flinches imperceptibly.

“Ah. I can see why you might have a problem, then.”

He stares her down, waiting for her to suggest something. Anything, really. Some cure to the matter at hand, some quick fix to get him out of her head.

“I’m sure the matter will right itself in a few days,” is all she has to offer up. “In the meantime, avoiding Glimmer, which you’re already so very good at, is likely the best course of action.”

He lets the silence sit and simmer for a few moments. “That’s it?”

“What do you want me to do, Hordak? Scoop myself out of your brain like I’m ice cream? It’s just not possible. So long as we don’t drift again, the ghost drift won’t reinforce itself.” A beat, and then, “I can’t believe you’ve never experienced it before. It will fade in a few days.”

Hordak scowls at her and taps his cane on the floor, frustrated. He wants to link gone, and he wants it gone now.

Angella scowls right back at him as though she can read his mind. In a sense, she can. “Get over it and get out of my office,” she orders, succinct.

He doesn’t budge; the Marshal’s scowl turns into a sly smile.

“I ran into Entrapta this morning,” she says, by which she means, _the ghost drift goes both ways._

The blood drains completely from Hordak’s face; he buries his face in his hands and groans, wishing he had never stormed into this office in the first place.

“Not that it’s any of my business,” she continues, shuffling through some of the papers on her desk. “You can’t do any better. I thought you were going to die alone with your cat in that lab, of course, inhaling kaiju fumes, since you can’t die in a jaeger like we signed up to.”

“We’re not— it’s not— it’s. It’s _nebulous_ , Angella.”

“Did I ask? I don’t think I asked.” She stops moving her papers around and levels him with a look. “And it doesn’t seem _nebulous_ on your part, Hordak; don’t lie to me, it’s unbecoming. Or to yourself, for that matter, if that’s what you’re trying to do. Now get out, I really do have work to do.”

Hordak listens to her this time, complying with her orders now that he’s been thoroughly embarrassed. He makes a note to be sure to avoid Glimmer for the time being, which should be more than easy enough.

He heads to the lab next, feeling wired.

Entrapta is on her side of the lab, hunched over her tablet. She looks up as he walks in, and her face brightens immediately.

“Hordak! You’re awake!”

“Er, yes,” he says, awkward. Their last interaction was less than ideal, and between that and the kissing he isn’t sure how to play this. Perhaps the lab wasn’t the best place to come after all.

“You were asleep for _forever_ ,” his lab partner expresses, waving her tablet in the air. There’s something on the screen of it that he can’t quite make out, some kind of diagram that must have to do with her latest experiment.

“I don’t think three days quantifies as forever.” He shuffles forward into the lab, cane tapping against the ground. His side is just as spotless as he left it, HUD powered down, notebooks piled neatly on his desk. There are new jars of kaiju specimen waiting for him on the exam table, labels slightly crooked. “Where did those come from?”

“Someone scraped what they could off of the Phoenix’s knuckles. There was a lot, apparently. They thought you might like them?” Hordak picks up one of the jars, ammonia bubbling to the top. He’ll spend more time with them later, dissecting and examining and mapping out the cellular structure.

For now he settles into his desk chair, unhooking Imp from his leash.

“So,” Entrapta drawls, voice over loud as she draws Hordak’s attention back to her. “You used to pilot Ancient Titan.”

He should have known this was coming; the questions, the wondering, the grilling. His whole history with the PPDC comes up when you search his name on the internet, and Entrapta’s no dummy. She would suspect that there’s more than just what was reported to his single greatest public embarrassment.

He doesn’t like to talk about his career as a Ranger with the PPDC. He and Hector worked good together, certainly, took down five kaiju and lived long enough to tell the tale, but they failed in the end. Ancient Titan fought the kaiju Cragback, allowed it all the way into Los Angeles, and stalled out. Some kind of mechanical failure, and Hordak doesn’t remember the rest. He just remembers waking up some indeterminable amount of time later in the med bay with shiny new scars and a pain in his leg, Hector nowhere to be found.

But rather than saying all of that, he just says, “Yes.”

Entrapta wanders over to his side of the lab. Her tablet is in her hands, like always, and Hordak ignores it.

“I was watching from Vladivostok when you fell, and it didn’t look . . . right.” He would literally pay her to stop talking about this if he thought it would work. “So I requested the logs from that day, and I got them almost immediately, which was weird, but whatever, and—”

“They gave you access to the logs?” Hordak interrupts, suddenly interested. Entrapta nods.

“That’s what I said. Geez. I thought you were listening. Anyway, I’ve been looking at the logs and everything looks completely normal at first glance, up until the Titan stalls out. Every reading is within acceptable parameters, up until the time of the incident. But then I started to look at all the readings individually and everything still looked normal, until I got to your cradle.” Here, Entrapta hesitates, setting her tablet down on Hordak’s desk. He suspects she wants him to look at it, but he wouldn’t be able to make sense of the logs even if he did. “The readings from your cradle were all over the place from the second you were strapped in. They were unstable compared to Hector’s, which were normal.

“I think your cradle was tampered with.”

She watches closely as Hordak’s face goes through a range of emotions, from confusion to shock to anger to resignation in a span of seconds.

“Of course it was,” he spits, angered with himself for not thinking of it before. Of course his cradle was tampered with. And he has a sneaking suspicion of who did it, too.

But before he can speak more on the subject, Catra and Adora come marching into the lab, Adora in the lead, cut high on her forehead and right arm in a sling. “Hordak!” she shouts. “You got back in a jaeger! For _us_!”

“I didn’t do it for _you_!” he sputters immediately. “I was forced in!”

“Ha! I told you!” Catra crows. There’s a bruise on her cheekbone, and her bottom lip is split open, but she doesn't look otherwise worse for the wear. “He doesn’t care that much!”

“I don’t care at all!” he defends himself, derisive. Beside him, Entrapta giggles, picking her tablet up. The mood has lightened considerably in a matter of seconds, the young jaeger pilots contributing greatly. “Go back to Los Angeles and leave me alone, both of you!”

The Rangers laugh at him. “I’m sure Shadow Weaver would love that,” Adora says sarcastically.

“There’s so few people here who like you, Hordak,” Catra remarks. “Why are you trying to send away two of us?”

Hordak spins around in his chair and sets to ignoring all three of them.

✮

Entrapta thinks he took the news surprisingly well, all things considered. Maybe she shouldn’t have dropped the idea that his cradle in Ancient Titan was purposely tampered with on him like that so soon after he had woken up, but she’d never been very tactful about this sort of thing.

But that was two months ago, and they haven’t talked about it since. She still has the logs from Ancient Titan stored safely on her tablet, and nothing changes no matter how many times she looks at them. Is it possible Hordak’s cradle wasn’t tampered with? Sure, but the chances are slim; had it been just a regular mechanical failure, then Hector’s cradle would have failed as well and it hadn’t. It’s what makes her believe someone tampered with Hordak’s cradle. The evidence she has is flimsy and hardly evidence, not enough to go to anyone with, but she had to let Hordak know.

Now they stand together on one of the loading docks of the Dome, feet surrounded by buckets and shovels and clam guns. The large military jeep before them is gassed up and almost ready to go; it just has to be loaded with the gear at their feet.

Neither of them moves to complete the task, choosing instead to watch as their companions for the upcoming trip bicker over who gets to sit next to who. Catra is already lounging in the very back of the jeep, sprawled out with her eyes closed like a large cat sunning itself.

“But I want to sit next to Glimmer! You’re with her all the time!” Adora whines, blue eyes begging as she looks at Bow.

“You should sit next to your partner for drift compatibility purposes!” Bow argues, and Entrapta could probably make a study as to how he isn’t cold in his crop top. The wind bites at her even through her thick jacket, and she shuffles a little closer to Hordak. “Spend some more time together, to help foster your bond!”

The blond Ranger groans, long and drawn out. “I’ve known Catra since we were _children_. We couldn’t be more _bonded_. You sit next to her; she kicks on car rides!”

“Why are we taking them again?” Entrapta asks Hordak, quietly.

“Because the Marshal insisted.” He drags the hand with the keys in it down his face and announces in a louder tone, “Whoever loads the damned vehicle gets to sit next to Glimmer, never mind the fact that there’s a _middle seat_.”

The jeep is loaded in record time after that, Glimmer sliding into the middle seat with Adora and Bow on either side of her. Entrapa hauls herself into the passenger seat of the roofless vehicle. Hordak doesn’t bother waiting until everyone’s buckled in before he guns it.

The drive down the coast is cold and deserted; the wind claws at her hair, hungry fingers grasping. There are no civilians this close to the Dome or the exclusion zone, no civilians this close to the Pacific for fear of the kaiju.

This is Entrapta’s first time away from the Etherian Shatterdome since she arrived many moons ago; it’s her first good look at the coast since her helicopter ride to the Dome. The pine trees grow in thick copses, blotting out her view of the ocean here and there. The air is crisp and fresh around her, salt thick on her tongue and in her nose.

The road is a mess from repeated kaiju attacks, concrete broken up in chunks and some parts missing entirely. It makes for slow going, Hordak swerving all over the road in an effort to avoid them.

It takes an hour to go twenty miles south, and in that time the chatter from the backseats never lets up, laughter spilling out like sunlight. Entrapta is chilled to the bone by the time they reach their destination, hair tangled into knots, cheeks numb from the wind.

Hordak has driven the jeep directly onto the dry sand of an estuary, and he ushers everyone out of the vehicle once he’s parked.

“Everyone gets a bucket,” he says, already sounding exhausted. His glasses are slipping down his nose.

“Uh, Hordak?” Bow ventures, hesitant. “There’s only three buckets.”

“I only consider some of you people.”

“We can clam in teams!” Entrapta grabs Hordak by the hand, bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet. It’s only mildly difficult in the sand and her big rubber boots. The other scientist looks down at their conjoined hands, bewildered. “Dibs on Hordak!”

“I don’t think anyone was going to fight you for him,” Glimmer says, glib. She grabs Bow by the elbow, clearly claiming him, leaving the Ranger duo to pair up. Adora looks slightly put out about the whole ordeal.

The buckets, shovels, and clam guns are passed out; Hordak explains in short, clipped sentences what to look for and how, exactly, to clam, leaving everyone a little more confused than they were when they stepped out of the jeep.

Entrapta carries the gear as she follows Hordak onto the estuary proper, wet sand squishing up around her boots and making a squelching sound with every step she takes. It’s slow going between the two of them, the younger members of their party rushing ahead and spreading out in the area to get to work.

She tilts her face toward the sky, soaking in the sunlight. It’s rare for her to get out of the lab and the Dome. Rarer still for the Hordak to be next to her. It’s pleasant, she thinks, to be out with him. To be doing science with him, somewhere other than the lab.

“Here should work,” he says at last. They’re a good deal away from the others, close to the ocean and far from the jeep. The wind tears at them both this close to the water, and Hordak has to raise his voice to be heard.

Entrapta gets to work with the shovel, searching for dimples in the sand. She digs carefully each time she finds one, careful to avoid breaking the shell of the clam, tossing each one in the bucket as she brings them to the surface.

She’s seven clams deep when Hordak says, “Uh, Entrapta?”

She looks in the bucket.

The clams are glowing blue with radiation from the kaiju blood.

“Oh, that’s not good,” she says, shaking the bucket.

“Not entirely unexpected, though.” Hordak pulls a knife out of the pocket of the big puffy coat he’s wearing and slides it into the clam, prying it open. “This, on the other hand, is.”

Inside, the clam has grown teeth. Great big fangs, dripping with saliva and salt water. They look to be serrated, only about a centimeter long.

Hordak drops it back into the bucket and picks up another, popping it open. It, too, has teeth equally as terrifying as the first.

“Why aren’t they dying from Kaiju Blue?” Entrapta queries, picking up the first clam he opened from the bucket. The inside of the clam is bright, electric blue, the same color the kaiju glow. The tilts it this way and that, curious.

“They were, are first. I think they’re adapting to it now,” Hordak responds.

He throws the clam, and not even the gulls will touch it.

✮

Hector sweeps into the lab, blond hair catching the light.

Hordak is ready and waiting for him, this time. He sits facing the blast doors, comfortable in his lab chair, cane leaning up against his desk. He’s left Imp in his room for the day, angering the cat for what it’s worth. Entrapta is elsewhere, busy doing who-knows-what, and he has the lab entirely to himself.

The conditions are perfect for what he wants.

“Brother!” Hector greets, exuberant. There’s a spring in his step; it’s never a good sign.

The conditions are less perfect for what Hordak wants.

It’s no matter; he can work with it. He’s learned to work with anything, after all these months surrounded by Entrapta and her experiments. He’s learned to be adaptable, to be flexible, to roll with the punches as they’re handed out to him.

He can do this.

He has to.

“Hector,” he says back, voice curt.

“What’s this? No games today?” His twin sounds offended at the idea, as though he was looking forward to the derision Hordak typically treats him with.

Hordak’s mouth twists down in a frown, fingers twisting in the fabric of his pants. He doesn’t say anything, simply sitting and waiting for a proper opening. He’s always lacked tact for this kind of thing.

Hector’s eyes narrow, corner of his mouth quirking up. “Oh, I know that look. You have a _problem_. Let me guess: It’s the Marshal? It’s your cat! No? Oh, I know! It’s the lab partner. It has to be the lab partner. She’s never struck me as all there, you know? And after the chainsaw incident, and the explosion, who can blame me? Well, what’s--”

“You.” The word is simple, but it holds so much accusation. So much _power_.

“Pardon?”

“You’re the problem.”

Hector levels him with a look that asks, _are you kidding me_. “And just what have I done, to deserve this ire?”

“You tampered with my cradle, and it ruined me. You tampered with Greyskulls Honor, and it got Mara and Light Hope killed. Hector, do you even understand what you’ve done?”

His face is smug. So sure of himself, so sure of his power. His station. Of the weight his name and actions carry, a shield against any wrongdoing.

And Hordak— even though Hordak is a mirror of him, he’s never had any of that surety. That positivity. That absolute belief that he can’t be touched, can’t be hurt, can’t be punished for his actions.

Hordak’s never wanted to erase that smug look more in his life.

“Of course I understand,” his twin says, voice like a snake oil salesman. “I’ve always understood. You were the golden boy, always the better Ranger, always holding me back with your curiosity about the kaiju, and where they came from, and what they were made of. What they wanted. It’s always been so annoying! So I knew I needed a new partner, but the only way to get one of those is if your old one dies or is medically retired. And it was so easy, tampering with your cradle; you always did place too much trust in the J-techs, didn’t you? Never bothered to check the wiring or anything yourself.”

“But they never gave you another partner.”

Rage ripples across Hector’s face, pure and unadulterated. “No one was considered drift compatible with me but you. Until Mara.”

Hordak can see where this is going. Dread forms in the pit of his stomach, heavy. Entrapta was right.

“But they decided to pair Mara up with Light Hope and send them here, to where you were stationed, to have them pilot Greyskull’s Honor. All because I was already a General, made to push papers around and hand out orders, made to save the glory for the younger generation. But I was made to be in a jaeger, I was _made_ to kill the kaiju. So I thought, what’s a little more tampering? It worked well enough on you.”

He thinks he might be sick.

“I thought Mara would be a good enough Ranger to pilot the jaeger on her own. To kill the kaiju on her own. That she would prove herself a good enough pilot to be my partner. But things didn’t quite turn out like I had planned, did they? We both know how it ended.”

It takes a moment for Hordak to make his mouth move; for him to make a single thought make its way from his brain to his mouth. “The only reason you came to visit me after all that time of silence was to tamper with jaegers.” His tongue is heavy in his mouth, the words clumsy. “Why come back at all, after that? Clearly you don’t like me.”

Hector shrugs. “Well, after that, tampering with the jaegers just became a fun past-time. Who would suspect me? A general with no background as a J-tech?”

Bile rises up in Hordak’s throat, hot and heavy. He has to fight to swallow it back down. He’d always known Hector was capable of horrific things, known Hector would go to great lengths to get what he wanted, but he’d never allowed his mind to wander those stretches.

“But then something unexpected happened,” Hector continues, scrubbing a hand through his hair. Bits of it fall into his face, disheveled. “You got to get back in a jaeger. You! A washed out, useless, sick—” Hordak flinches at the word. “—scientist, piloting a jaeger? Instead of me? Healthy, respected, me? It’s unthinkable. It should have been me!”

“You weren’t here,” Hordak points out, dry.

“My point still stands!” Lickspittle flies from Hector’s furious lips, pelting Hordak’s face. “It should have been me! I am your better, have always been your better! These stars on my chest should prove it, but they don’t seem to be enough!”

Hordak, on the other hand, has heard enough.

He holds up Entrapta’s recorder, thumbing the stop button. Hector’s eyes narrow, sweat glistening on his upper lip. His eyes flick back and forth between his twin and the old device in his hand, indecision writ large on his features.

“You recorded me?” he says, dawning realization in his voice. “I thought there was more trust between us than this, Hordak. I’m disappointed in you. Hand me the tape recorder, and we can forget all about this, brother.”

Without breaking eye contact, Hordak sets the tape recorder down on his desk. It hardly makes a noise as it connects with the metal there. He draws his hand back, allowing it to hover over the drawer he’s left half-open.

Hector draws his tongue over his lower lip, snake-like. “I said hand me the tape recorder, Hordak. Not ‘put it down’.”

Hordak lowers his eyes for a moment, focusing his attention on the half-opened drawer and ignoring his twin.

He brings up the gun the same time Hector points the knife at him.

Silence blankets the K-Science lab, numbing even the constant hum of the ever present equipment. The pain in Hordak’s leg seems heightened, now, sharpening all of his senses and pulling him fully into the moment.

“Oh,” he says sardonically, tilting the gun ever so slightly. “You brought a knife. A knife!” He begins to laugh, a wheezing, coughing thing. “What were you going to do, stab me? Am I not good enough to be shot at?”

For the first time in their lives, uncertainty creeps onto Hector’s face, twisting his features into something Hordak recognizes—he sees it enough on his own face when he looks in the mirror. And they are mirrors of each other, after all; it’s what they’ve been told, time and time again, all their lives from when they were children, to young cadets, to Rangers. But Hector has always been the better of the two, the brighter mirror, the better reflection, and Hordak has always been caught in his shadow.

Not anymore.

Hordak’s finger inches toward the safety.

Marshal Angella Brightmoon clears her throat. The gun wavers in Hordak’s hand as he whips his head toward the door of the lab, surprised to find that he and his twin suddenly have an audience. The Marshal stands there, hands folded behind her back, Catra and Adora standing on either side of her.

“General Kur does not carry a firearm because they are not part of standard PPDC loadout, even for a General. Therefore, he can’t shoot you.” The Marshal glares at both of them, pale eyes narrowing threateningly. Hordak lowers the gun an inch more, weapon in his hand growing heavier under her steely gaze. “General Kur, you are under arrest for tampering with several jaegers, resulting in the injuries of at least two PPDC Rangers and the deaths of two more. Drop the knife and come quietly.”

Hector snorts derisively, shaking his head. “You have no proof, nothing to connect me to your baseless accusations. I outrank you, Angella, and will not hesitate to have you court martialed if you attempt to go through with this farce. Even your accomplishments won’t protect you from this kind of monumental mistake. And him!” He gestures at Hordak with his knife, as though Hordak is some kind of second thought now that Angella has arrived. “He pulled the gun first! I was merely looking to defend myself!”

Beside Angella, Catra snorts while Adora begins to full-throatedly laugh. Hector’s face colors, red first and then purple with rage as he faces down the three women.

“The lab has cameras, dumbass,” Catra snipes, pulling a set of handcuffs out of her pocket. They jingle and jangle as they clatter together, silver plating sparkling as they catch the light. “Everything you just told Hordak was recorded. It was basically a confession. Drop the knife before we make you drop it.”

The knife clatters to the ground after a few moments of hesitation, color draining from Hector’s face with the noise.

Hordak only lowers the gun to his side once Catra and Adora have his twin in the handcuffs, arms secured behind his back. He watches quietly as they frogmarch Hector from the lab, his twin seething quietly, practically foaming at the mouth.

He can’t believe his gambit worked. Well, kind of worked. Worked a little bit. He certainly can’t take credit for all of it.

He’s a little numb, now that it seems to be over. Like part of him has been carved out and carried off with Hector, as though the chain connecting the two of them has finally snapped after all these years apart.

“Hordak?” Angella’s hand is outstretched. “You can give me the gun now.”

“The safety is on, Angella; I know what I’m doing.” A beat, and then, “Unlike you, apparently. Why didn’t you bring MPs? Allowing _teenagers_ to arrest a General? Have you lost your mind?”

“Me? You were about to shoot your brother, had I not interrupted!”

“That’s different! I was being threatened!” Hordak takes a small, limping step back from the Marshal, toward his desk. He sets the gun down on the metal surface and picks up Entrapta’s tape recorder, double checking to make sure it’s stopped recording before he offers it to Angella. “I know Catra said our interaction was recorded, but I also know she lies. So. Here. Just in case.”

Angella takes the device and pops the tape out deftly, snapping the recorder shut again with a satisfying click. She inserts the tape into her breast pocket, frowning at Hordak the entire time she does so. “What you did here today was reckless and entirely out of line. If I didn’t already know you were in therapy, I would order you to begin immediately.” The Marshal wipes at her forehead, heaving out a sigh. “Now, would you please give me the gun? It might be evidence.”

Hordak pauses from where he’s putting the firearm back in it’s little hard case, clip out. “Pardon? It wasn’t discharged.”

“I just want to be sure all of our bases are covered. You did threaten a PPDC General with it.”

“You just feel uncomfortable leaving me alone with it.”

“Yes. That too.”

With a huff, Hordak closes and locks the hard case, then passes it off to Angella. She trades him for Entraptra’s tape recorder, slipping it back into the palm of his hand.

The Marshal of the Etherian Shatterdome takes one last long, hard look at him before she takes her leave, back ramrod straight.

Hordak collapses back into his chair as she leaves, all the fight leaving him at once like a breath he’s been holding for too long. He can’t believe he did it; can’t believe he confronted his brother like he did. It feels like a weight has been lifted from his shoulders, as though he were Atlas and the world has suddenly left him.

He’s never felt so empty, nor so free.

✮

Entrapta walks into the lab just as the Marshal leaves, tablet clutched tight to her chest.

She had seen the whole thing, of course. There’s cameras surveilling the lab for security purposes, and one of the first things Entrapta had done upon arriving at the dome was gain access to them. Of course she was going to take advantage of them the second she knew Hector was in the dome, especially since the last two times he visited weird things had happened with the jaegers.

And it was a good thing she did, too, otherwise she wouldn’t have seen the second he had pulled the knife. She could have gone a lifetime without seeing Hordak pull the gun, though. It had given her the time to alert the Marshal, who had apparently already had enough of a heads up and was already on her way.

Great minds, alike thinking, the whole thing.

She finds Hordak boneless in his desk chair, face tilted back toward the ceiling, legs kicked out in front of him. His eyes open into slits as she approaches, the corner of his mouth curling upward.

“My cradle was tampered with. He admitted to it,” he says by way of greeting. “You were right.”

“I didn’t want to be.” She tucks her tablet away in her chest pocket. “Are you okay?”

He hums, eyes sliding closed again, shifting in his chair. One of his shoes connects with her own. “I will be. Eventually. My therapist is going to have a field day.”

They lapse into silence, Entrapta worrying at her lower lip with her teeth. She has the urge to kiss him, again. Has been having the urge lately, to be perfectly honest, but has been pretty good at battering it back down to whence it came.

But right now she finds she doesn’t want to push the urge away. Doesn’t want to ignore it. She’s always been a follow-her-gut kind of girl, why should this be any different?

She leans forward, hair trailing over his arms, and presses her mouth to his with little hesitation.

Pulls back after a moment when he doesn’t kiss her back, again.

“Hordak?” Her voice trembles slightly, heart in her throat. He’s looking at her, eyes narrowed, lips pursed. This close to his face, she feels over exposed, raw, as though she’s being peeled back layer by layer and examined like one of his kaiju specimens.

“Is this another experiment?” he asks, voice quiet.

She thinks. The first one was inconclusive, interrupted as it was. She would like to repeat it, to gather more data, to understand more fully.

But maybe she doesn’t have to call everything an experiment to understand it.

“No,” she answers, sealing her mouth against his.

Hordak smiles against her mouth and kisses her back.

✮

There are people in his lab.

He can’t bring himself to mind, anymore.

The fluorescent yellow tape he put down nearly a year ago to bisect the opposing sides of the lab has been torn up, no longer needed. He doesn’t mind if people invade his space anymore, so long as those ‘people’ happen to be Entrapta.

He supposes Catra and Adora aren’t bad, either, so long as they stay out of his way. But it seems that wherever Adora goes, there’s Glimmer, and where Glimmer goes, there’s Bow. They’ve all attached themselves to Entrapta in one way or another, and by extension, to him.

It’s not awful as he thought it would be, to be honest. Not that he’ll ever admit out loud to anyone other than his therapist, under intense questioning.

There are people in his lab. And laughter. And kaiju blood and guts. And explosions and spare jaeger parts.

He doesn’t mind.

**Author's Note:**

> If you've made it this far, you're a goddamn champion. Thank you so much. Let me know what you think! 
> 
> come join me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/munchlaxe).

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [digging up the grave](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28940145) by [jaegerjagues](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaegerjagues/pseuds/jaegerjagues)




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